I really enjoyed this article (translated by Safari):
https://caad.club/aventuras-y-bases-de-datos/
It fills in some gaps in my knowledge about the lineage of some British adventure games.
What I wondered is if everyone independently invented bytecode to allow compact portable implementation or whether it all traced back to zcode, even if indirectly.
I already knew that Ken Reed's article in August 1980's Practical Computing was a key moment. Scott Adams in the US had previously had success with adventure games but it seems Reed reverse engineered the implementation and then published his own database/bytecode driven design.
As a kid that article inspired me to start on my own game authoring system but nothing I published. (However, talking about the project probably clinched a job interview for me at 18!)
That article was broadly influential across the adventure game ecosystem in the UK and some published adventures were almost literal implementations from that article. The early Artic Software adventures by Cecil Charles (MBE) are an example. (Wikipedia says they used a custom engine but I'm pretty sure that's not 100% true.)
Funny I had to read a Spanish language article to find this out.
But now I need to read a bit more on where Scott Adams got his implementation ideas from.
