This is awesome to see. There's been a lot of articles about zork lately, so I started writing my own interpreter, just to see what all the fuss is about. It's a pretty interesting system. I'm currently trying to step/debug through zork too see how they implemented the parsing, game state, and other such things, and it is really quite interesting.

I've considered trying to do a hardware implementation, but concluded it is beyond my skill. Some things like user input can be complicated. It is the interpreter's job to split the input on a program-defined set of delimiters, look up each token in a dictionary provided by the program, and copy a variable number of specified values it finds base on that info into other locations. That's really complicated for a single instruction, and makes it pretty apparent to me that their target from the beginning was interpreters, not any kind of special hardware.

Nevertheless, its an awesome project, and a really fun thought experiment. I'd love to see a physical version of something like this from 74xx chips.