Zork • Manual Cover C M Y K August 1993
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Activision Case Study
RIVERSTAR.COM ACTIVISION CASE STUDY Entertainment Publisher uses RiverStar to Streamline Returns CHALLENGE Activision inherited the Guitar Hero brand through their acquisition of ABOUT ACTIVISION RedOctane. Activision was unfamiliar with warranty replacements required Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, from hardware games and for that reason, relied on legacy processes Activision Blizzard, Inc. is the world’s developed by RedOctane. Because RedOctane’s processes were mostly largest pure-play interactive entertainment manual, with no troubleshooting, Activision customers would be referred to software publisher with leading market RedOctane’s website for warranty support. For some games, the customer had positions across all categories of the growing to email a copy of the receipt, further delaying the time to process the claim. interactive entertainment software industry. The customer could call RedOctane for warranty support, but due to limited Activision is the video game publisher that resources, call handle times were very high. The resulting outcome was a large is best known for game franchises such as number of dissatisfied customers with the RedOctane warranty process. World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk With the growing popularity of gaming products with hardware components Ride and Call of Duty. With global operations and a pipeline of new hardware games on the horizon, Activision was tasked in 13 countries, Activision has grown into a with creating a new process that would be automated throughout the $5 billion video game powerhouse. company to provide a better customer experience. The Guitar Hero franchise continues to In addition to working with new warranty support processes, the Guitar Hero redefine gaming by delivering innovative World Tour game was released just before the busy 2008 holiday season. -
The New Zork Times Dark – Carry a Lamp VOL
“All the Grues New Zork Area Weather: That Fit, We Print” The New Zork Times Dark – carry a lamp VOL. 3. .No. 1 WINTER 1984 INTERNATIONAL EDITION SORCERER HAS THE MAGIC TOUCH InfoNews Roundup New Game! Hint Booklets Sorcerer, the second in the In December, Infocom's long- Enchanter series of adventures in the awaited direct mail operation got mystic arts, is now available. The underway. Many of the functions game was written by Steve formerly provided by the Zork Users Meretzky, whose hilarious science Group were taken over by Infocom. fiction game, Planetfall, was named Maps and InvisiClues hint booklets by InfoWorld as the Best Adventure were produced for all 10 of Game of 1983. In Sorcerer, you are a Infocom's products. The games member of the prestigious Circle of themselves were also made available Enchanters, a position that you primarily as a service to those of you achieved in recognition of your in remote geographical areas and to success in defeating the Warlock those who own the less common Krill in Enchanter. computer systems. When the game starts, you realize Orders are processed by the that Belboz, the Eldest of the Circle, Creative Fulfillment division of the and the most powerful Enchanter in DM Group, one of the most the land, has disappeared. Perhaps he respected firms in direct mail. Their has just taken a vacation, but it facilities are in the New York metro- wouldn't be like him to leave without politan area, which explains the letting you know. You remember strange addresses and phone num- that he has been experimenting with bers you'll see on the order forms. -
Guitar Hero® Live Puts Fans in the Game with Crowd-Sourced Music Video for Ed Sheeran's "Sing"
Guitar Hero® Live Puts Fans in the Game with Crowd-Sourced Music Video for Ed Sheeran's "Sing" "Guitar Hero TV Star" Gives Fans the Chance to Star in the First User-Generated Music Video for Guitar Hero Live with the World Premiere Video Playable in the Game Fans to Submit Lip-Synching Clips through the Popular musical.ly Mobile App SANTA MONICA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- In celebration of the highly anticipated return of Guitar Hero, Activision Publishing, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATVI), is partnering with crowd-sourced music video creation app musical.ly to kick off Guitar Hero TV Star, which will ask fans to submit clips of themselves singing and dancing along to Ed Sheeran's hit song "Sing." The end result will be a world premiere, user-generated music video in GHTV, Guitar Hero Live's playable music video network. "Guitar Hero Live gives you the thrill of being a rock star by playing in front of real crowds or awesome music videos, so we wanted to give fans the opportunity to become stars of their own music video that will be featured and playable in the game. This is something that has never been done before, and we believe it is the perfect way to celebrate the launch of the game," said Tim Ellis, CMO of Activision Publishing, Inc. "With GHTV, the game's online playable music video network, we can deliver all kinds of gameplay experiences that just weren't possible in the past. To put real fans into a video that people can play along to in the game is an expression of the innovation that we have built into Guitar Hero Live, and we're excited for fans to play along - and sing along - to the music." "Guitar Hero and musical.ly share a similar vision to make music more participatory and interactive," said Jun Zhu, co-founder and co-CEO of musical.ly. -
Second Quarter 2021 Results August 2021
SECOND QUARTER 2021 RESULTS AUGUST 2021 1 Safe Harbor Disclosure Please review our SEC filings on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q The statements contained herein that are not historical facts are central banks around the world, including the impact on interest online gaming service; potential data breaches and other forward-looking statements including, but not limited to rates; increased demand for our games due to stay-at-home orders cybersecurity risks; significant disruption during our live events; statements about: (1) projections of revenues, expenses, income and curtailment of other forms of entertainment, which may not risks related to the impacts of catastrophic events, including the or loss, earnings or loss per share, cash flow, or other financial be sustained; and volatility in foreign exchange rates); our ability to susceptibility of the location of our headquarters to earthquakes; items; (2) statements of our plans and objectives, including those consistently deliver popular, high-quality titles in a timely manner, provisions in our corporate documents that may make it more related to releases of products or services and restructuring which has been made more difficult as a result of the COVID-19 difficult for any person to acquire control of our company; risks and activities; (3) statements of future financial or operating pandemic; competition; concentration of revenue among a small costs associated with legal proceedings, including the impact of the performance, including the impact of tax items thereon; and (4) number of franchises; our ability to satisfy the expectations of complaint filed by the California Department of Fair Employment statements of assumptions underlying such statements. -
Janette Cohen Scalie Redoctane +46 (0)8 44 18 615 [email protected]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE For media inquiries, please contact: Janette Cohen Scalie RedOctane +46 (0)8 44 18 615 [email protected] GUITAR HERO® CATALOG EXPANDS WITH NEW MUSIC FROM ROCK ‘N’ ROLL ICONS QUEEN AND JIMI HENDRIX THIS MONTH Six Additional Tracks from Countries throughout Europe and the James Bond Theme Song Further Add to Guitar Hero World Tour’s Downloadable Content Set List SANTA MONICA, CA – March 3, 2009 – This month, gamers will again be able to expand their virtual set lists with over a dozen new downloadable tracks for Activision Publishing, Inc.’s (Nasdaq: ATVI) Guitar Hero® World Tour. With over 37 million songs downloaded for the franchise to date, Guitar Hero® fans will soon be able to experience more awesome music – from the likes of English rock ‘n’ roll icons Queen, guitar legend Jimi Hendrix, a host of European superstars and more – which will join the more than 550 songs rocking the Guitar Hero catalog already. On March 5th, Guitar Hero World Tour’s global music library will continue to grow with three additional tracks from some of Europe’s greatest bands. The third European Track Pack, which includes the hit song “Break It Out” by Italian pop punk band Vanilla Sky and “In the Shadows” by one of Finland’s most successful bands, The Rasmus, will also contain “Cʹest Comme Ça” the top single from French pop rock duo Les Rita Mitsouko’s 1986 album The No Comprendo. As a follow‐up to the third European Track Pack, rockers from the Netherlands, Germany and Spain will also be contributing to Guitar Hero World Tour’s increasing catalog of downloadable content. -
List of MS-DOS Commands - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia Page 1 of 25
List of MS-DOS commands - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Page 1 of 25 List of MS-DOS commands From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In the personal computer operating systems MS -DOS and PC DOS, a number of standard system commands were provided for common Contents tasks such as listing files on a disk or moving files. Some commands were built-in to the command interpreter, others existed as transient ■ 1 Resident and transient commands commands loaded into memory when required. ■ 2 Command line arguments Over the several generations of MS-DOS, ■ 3 Windows command prompt commands were added for the additional ■ 4 Commands functions of the operating system. In the current ■ 4.1 @ Microsoft Windows operating system a text- ■ 4.2 : mode command prompt window can still be ■ 4.3 ; used. Some DOS commands carry out functions ■ 4.4 /* equivalent to those in a UNIX system but ■ 4.5 ( ) always with differences in details of the ■ 4.6 append function. ■ 4.7 assign ■ 4.8 attrib ■ 4.9 backup and restore Resident and transient ■ 4.10 BASIC and BASICA commands ■ 4.11 call ■ 4.12 cd or chdir ■ 4.13 chcp The command interpreter for MS-DOS runs ■ 4.14 chkdsk when no application programs are running. ■ 4.15 choice When an application exits, if the command ■ 4.16 cls interpreter in memory was overwritten, MS- ■ 4.17 copy DOS will re-load it from disk. The command ■ 4.18 ctty interpreter is usually stored in a file called ■ 4.19 defrag "COMMAND.COM". Some commands are ■ 4.20 del or erase internal and built-into COMMAND.COM, ■ 4.21 deltree others are stored on disk in the same way as ■ 4.22 dir application programs. -
A Letter from CEO Bobby Kotick to All Employees
A Letter From CEO Bobby Kotick to All Employees July 28, 2021 SANTA MONICA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul. 27, 2021-- Activision Blizzard, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI) CEO Bobby Kotick today sent the following letter to all employees. July 27, 2021 This has been a difficult and upsetting week. I want to recognize and thank all those who have come forward in the past and in recent days. I so appreciate your courage. Every voice matters - and we will do a better job of listening now, and in the future. Our initial responses to the issues we face together, and to your concerns, were, quite frankly, tone deaf. It is imperative that we acknowledge all perspectives and experiences and respect the feelings of those who have been mistreated in any way. I am sorry that we did not provide the right empathy and understanding. Many of you have told us that active outreach comes from caring so deeply for the Company. That so many people have reached out and shared thoughts, suggestions, and highlighted opportunities for improvement is a powerful reflection of how you care for our communities of colleagues and players – and for each other. Ensuring that we have a safe and welcoming work environment is my highest priority. The leadership team has heard you loud and clear. We are taking swift action to be the compassionate, caring company you came to work for and to ensure a safe environment. There is no place anywhere at our Company for discrimination, harassment, or unequal treatment of any kind. We will do everything possible to make sure that together, we improve and build the kind of inclusive workplace that is essential to foster creativity and inspiration. -
Jay Simon 3/18/2002 STS 145 Case Study Zork: a Study of Early
Jay Simon 3/18/2002 STS 145 Case Study Zork: A Study of Early Interactive Fiction I: Introduction If you are a fan of interactive fiction, or have any interest in text-based games from the early 1980’s, then you are no doubt familiar with a fascinating series known as Zork. For the other 97 percent of the population, the original Zork games are text-based adventures in which the player is given a setting, and types in a command in standard English. The command is processed, and sometimes changes the state of the game. This results in a new situation that is then communicated to the user, restarting the cycle. This type of adventure game is classified as belonging to a genre called “interactive fiction”. Zork is exceptional in that the early Zork games are by far the most popular early interactive fiction titles ever released. It is interesting to examine why these games sold so well, while most other interactive fiction games could not sell for free in the 1980’s. As we will see, this is a result of many different technological and stylistic aspects of Zork that separate it from the rest of the genre. Zork is a unique artifact in gaming history. II: MIT and Infocom – The Prehistory of Zork Zork was not a modern project developed under a strict timeline by a designated team of programmers, but credit is given to two MIT phenoms named Marc Blank and Dave Lebling. Its history can be traced all the way back to the invention of a medium-sized machine called the PDP-10, in the 1960’s. -
Reading and Acting While Blindfolded: the Need for Semantics in Text Game Agents
Reading and Acting while Blindfolded: The Need for Semantics in Text Game Agents Shunyu Yaoy∗ Karthik Narasimhany Matthew Hausknechtz yPrinceton University zMicrosoft Research {shunyuy, karthikn}@princeton.edu [email protected] Abstract et al., 2020), open-domain question answering systems (Ammanabrolu et al., 2020), knowledge Text-based games simulate worlds and inter- act with players using natural language. Re- graphs (Ammanabrolu and Hausknecht, 2020; Am- cent work has used them as a testbed for manabrolu et al., 2020; Adhikari et al., 2020), and autonomous language-understanding agents, reading comprehension systems (Guo et al., 2020). with the motivation being that understanding Meanwhile, most of these models operate un- the meanings of words or semantics is a key der the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, component of how humans understand, reason, where the agent explores the same environment and act in these worlds. However, it remains in repeated episodes, learning a value function or unclear to what extent artificial agents utilize semantic understanding of the text. To this policy to maximize game score. From this per- end, we perform experiments to systematically spective, text games are just special instances of reduce the amount of semantic information a partially observable Markov decision process available to a learning agent. Surprisingly, we (POMDP) (S; T; A; O; R; γ), where players issue find that an agent is capable of achieving high text actions a 2 A, receive text observations o 2 O scores even in the complete absence of lan- and scalar rewards r = R(s; a), and the under- guage semantics, indicating that the currently lying game state s 2 S is updated by transition popular experimental setup and models may 0 be poorly designed to understand and leverage s = T (s; a). -
Z-Machine and Descendants
Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Glk! A universal user interface! for interactive fiction! Relatively universal, anyhow. Universal-ish. # 1 Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Andrew Plotkin [email protected] http://zarfhome.com/ https://github.com/erkyrath @zarfeblong on Twitter Glk, Glulx, Hadean Lands, System’s Twilight, Spider and Web, Capture the Flag with Stuff, Shade, this t-shirt I’m wearing, Seltani, The Dreamhold, Branches and Twigs and Thorns, quite a lot of adventure game reviews, Praser 5, Boodler, A Change in the Weather, an imperfect diagram of the Soul Reaver timeline, Dual Transform, Draco Concordans, and you know how that game Mafia is also called Werewolf? Ok, funny story there — # 2 Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Zork 1 (Infocom) # 3 GrueFacts™: A grue can eat doughnuts indefinitely. Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Z-machine and descendants 1979: Z-machine design 1980: Z-machine version 3 (Zork 1) 1985: Z-machine version 4 (A Mind Forever Voyaging) 1987: ITF (first open-source Z-interpreter) 1988: Z-machine version 6 (Zork Zero) 1989: Infocom shuts down 1993: Inform (Curses) 1994: Inform 5 1996: Inform 6 1997: Glk spec 1999: Glulx spec 2006: Inform 7 2008: Parchment (first Javascript Z-interpreter) # 4 GrueFacts™: The first grue to swim around the world was named Amelia Nosewig. Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 XZip (Curses, Graham Nelson) # 5 GrueFacts™: Grues live an average of 67 years, after which they retire to Iceland. -
Z-Machine Interpreters in the 1980S, Infocom Published About Three
By Hugo Labrande Issue #5 : Z-Machine interpreters In the 1980s, Infocom published about three dozen of text adventures on most platforms of the era, from the TRS-80 to the Atari ST. Their method to spend minimal time on portability was to create a virtual machine, the Z-Machine, and compile their games into bytecode that could be read by the Z-Machine. All was needed was some software that could read this bytecode and execute it on a target machine: an interpreter. To ensure that all interpreters behaved coherently, Infocom actually wrote specifications for the Z-Machine (version 3, 4, and 5 for text-only, and 6 for graphical adventures), which specified how the interpreter should behave; this was to make sure that the people tasked with writing a new interpreter would follow the same rules as the other ones. This specification was then reverse-engineered by amateurs as early as the end of the 1980s (Barry Boone on the TI-99/4A, the InfoTaskForce in Australia, etc.). In the 1990s, people added some features and fixed a few inconsistencies, and created version 8, which was basically the same as version 5 but allowed larger file sizes. This gave the Z-Machine standards, which are available online: http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/index.html This means that if you’d like to implement a Z-Machine interpreter, all you need to do is follow this specification. Over the years, literally hundreds of Z-Machine interpreters have been written, for sometimes very exotic platforms. They sometimes have their own quirks, can fall out of fashion, or get forgotten; I cannot begin to retrace all the Z-Machine interpreters that have been written. -
Memory Management
University of Mississippi eGrove American Institute of Certified Public Guides, Handbooks and Manuals Accountants (AICPA) Historical Collection 1993 Memory management American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Information echnologyT Division Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides Part of the Accounting Commons, and the Taxation Commons Recommended Citation American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Information echnologyT Division, "Memory management" (1993). Guides, Handbooks and Manuals. 486. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/486 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) Historical Collection at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Guides, Handbooks and Manuals by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DIVISION BULLETIN AICPA American Institute of Certified Public Accountants TECHNOLOGY Notice to Readers This technology bulletin is the first in a series of bulletins that provide accountants with information about a particular technology. These bulletins are issued by the AICPA Information Technology Division for the benefit of Information Technology Section Members. This bulletin does not establish standards or preferred practice; it represents the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the policies of the AICPA or the Information Technology Division. The Information Technology Division expresses its appreciation to the author of this technology bulletin, Liz O’Dell. She is employed by Crowe, Chizek and Company in South Bend, Indiana, as a manager of firmwide microcomputer operations, supporting both hardware and software applications. Liz is an Indiana University graduate with an associate’s degree in computer information systems and a bachelor’s degree in business management.