Xyzzy (computing)

Xyzzy comes from the Colossal Cave Adventure computer game, where it is the first "magic string" that most players encounter (others include "plugh" and "plover").

According to Ron Hunsinger, the sequence of letters "XYZZY" has been used as a mnemonic to remember the process for computing cross products.

[3] Will Crowther, the author of Colossal Cave Adventure, states that he was unaware of the mnemonic, and that he "made it up from whole cloth" when writing the game.

[4] Xyzzy has been implemented as an undocumented no-op command on several operating systems; in the 16-bit version of Data General's AOS, for example, it would typically respond "Nothing happens", just as the game did if the magic was invoked at the wrong spot or before a player had performed the action that enabled the word.

[5] On several computer systems from Sun Microsystems, the command "xyzzy" is used to enter the interactive shell of the U-Boot bootloader.

[citation needed] Since regaining ownership of the Coraid software, the command is being returned to the system and now, in VSX release 8, the response is ">>Foof!<< You are in a debris room."

This developer, who was a frequent speaker at the events organised by the IUGN, managed to put the function back into the product and—especially for Wim—added handling for the 'wim' value of the parameter.

The popular Minesweeper game under older versions of Microsoft Windows had a cheat mode triggered by entering the command xyzzy, then pressing the key sequence shift and then enter, which turned a single pixel in the top-left corner of the entire screen into a small black or white dot depending on whether or not the mouse pointer is over a mine.

The command commonly produces a humorous response in other Infocom games and text adventures, leading to its usage in the title of the interactive fiction competition, the XYZZY Awards.