(1) The UCSD p-Machine was contemporaneous and made it feasible to compile Pascal for machines like the 6502 which were terrible targets for conventional compilers. It was atrocious in every way, particularly atrociously slow. At the time many CS professors with Microsoft BASIC being the dominant teaching languages but UCSD plus the inability to do systems programming in ISO Pascal made a generation of young programmers hate Pascal with passion.
(2) Scott Adams made an adventure interpreter was was similar but less sophisticated than the z-machine but similarly portable, in fact you could write a Scott Adams interpreter in BASIC [1] but he also wrote interpreters in assembly for the most popular platforms
https://6502disassembly.com/a2-scott-adams/interp.html
(3) Infocom developed the games on a PDP-10 machine which might be the last general purpose computer that survived with other than the 8-bit byte. (Though it had bitwise addressing which helped it cope with the industry going in that direction).
[1] Notably if you tried to write an adventure game in straight up BASIC you'd struggle. It's not like you could look up a verb in a hashtable and dispatch to subroutine. You'd be writing incredibly long if-then-else ladders nested inside if-then-else ladders which is bad enough in a civilized language.
The Infocom games were also super-tight on memory. There’s a presentation by Dave Liebling I think at some game developers conference on YouTube someplace that goes into this among other things.
Game Developers Conference Classic Gaming Postmortem: Zork (2014)
"Dave Lebling, co-author of Zork and co-founder of Infocom, gives a postmortem talk on the classic text adventure. Lebling, who currently works as a senior principal software engineer at BAE Systems, created the "grue," co-authored Zork I-III and wrote seven other text adventures. He plans to give an hour-long talk explaining, among other things, the creation of both the mainframe and microcomputer versions of Zork, the trials and tribulations of coding a cutting-edge text parser, and what it was like to experiment with self-publishing at a time when most PC games were sold in hand-packed plastic bags.
Thanks. I used to run into Dave and other Infocom folks at Steve Meretzky’s Oscar parties but since Steve decamped to CA I may run into a few CA locals once in a great while if I happen to be out there at the right time for some reason.
As a side-note to the Scott Adams interpreter and the struggle of writing in BASIC, it should be noted that Scott Adams's original work was in fact in BASIC. He published that source code in BYTE Magazine, should anyone wish to poke around and see what was required to get a game and parser working.
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12/page/n193/...
Incredibly long if-then ladders, or some kind of little assembly routine to let you GOTO a value instead of a constant...
https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue67/331_1_Compute...
The UCSD system was indeed astonishingly, unusably slow. When I got to try it in high school computer lab, in the 80s, I was like "Did whoever ported it to this particular computer just totally fuck it up? WTF?!"
An Infocom adventure on a machine with 16k RAM also had frequent pauses to fetch from floppy, but it was much more tolerable.
Re verb lookups in Basic: you could use DATA statements and READ in a FOR loop for lookup. I don't know what was typical but that's what I recall from some examples.