Developed at MIT between 1977 and 1979, Zork is the quintessential interactive fiction adventure game. Descended from the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure (the game I’m actually much more familiar with), it started players at a simple White House in the woods and invited them to explore an expansive underground empire.
I played the M.I.T. release for this review. A later, more polished version was published by Infocom as the Zork Trilogy in 1980.
Quote
It was a high-resolution scan of the instruction manual cover for the text adventure game Zork – the version released in 1980 by Personal Software for the TRS-80 Model III.
I’d played and solved Zork once, a long time ago, back during the first year of the Hunt. But I’d also played hundreds of other classic text adventure games that year, including all of Zork’s sequels, and so most of the details of the game had now faded in my memory.
Game Play
Zork is classic text adventure game, and defined the genre for a generation. It’s a text only game in which you enter commands like “west” or “climb ladder” or “get sword.” The parser is adequate, but not advanced; it understands simple instructions (or at least the instructions it expects).
When you input a command, it outputs a description of the room you are in. The goal of game (which I learned from Ready Player One), is to return all of the treasures in Zork’s expansive dungeon to the small White House where you start the adventure.
Impressions
I’ve been looking forward to playing Zork since I started the Ready Player One Replay, not because I played it a ton as a kid … but because I didn’t play it a ton. Despite loving interactive fiction games and playing a bunch of other Infocom games (most notably the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), I never got into the Zork trilogy. This is probably because I couldn’t find a cracked copy at my middle school, though discovering the Ultima series likely also played a part).
Once I found Ultima (particularly Ultima IV Quest of the Avatar), it was hard to go back to text only games.
It is still a fun game but it’s one that requires you to map it if you want any chance of completing it. Heck, half the fun of the (at least for me) was drawing the map. Granted mapping is tricky because not everything connects as you’d think it would (e.g. traveling south to another room works, but sometimes going north again doesn’t lead you back to where you were.
I didn’t beat the game, but it’s one I plan on revisiting in the future. I know there are plenty of tiny, twisting passages that I still need to explore.
High Scores
- My High Score: 35 points out of 646 points. My actual high schore was probably in the low 100s, but I restarted a lot.
The Ready Player One Replay is an ongoing exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Love it or hate it, there’s value in revisiting our geeky roots.
Resources
Where to Play
- Classic Reload: Zork
- RetroGames.cz: Zork
- Internet Archive: Zork
- Text Adventures: Zork
- Frotz – An interactive fiction archive and platform, playable on iOS.
Commentary
- Clue of the Broken Needle: West of House – A Zork-inspired needle point.
- Strategy Wiki: Zork I: The Great Underground Empire Walkthrough
Probably the last time I played a computer game with any intensity – I was amazingly tasked by my mother to map and provide a solution so she could support the speculate students with the game. A TRS-80 that I had to repair first being the pinnacle of school IT resources in 1986. Truly a fond reminder of a different world.
Thanks Ken!