Zork

This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

This article or section is about something oldschool - and awesome. Make sure your rose-tinted glasses are on nice and tight, and prepare for a lovely walk down nostalgia lane.

Zork is /v/. Actually... we're unsure /v/ would exist if not for Zork. This isn't where interactive fiction a.k.a. text-adventure got its start but it is where it broke into the mainstream.

Basically what this phenomenon is, is a quartet of MIT nerds screwing around on the shared terminals of the late 1970s, trying to redo Advent in part to make mock of it. Advent was already halfway a parody of fantasy-tropes mixed in with a cave-exploration simulator, so Zork amped up teh funneh.

So that's what you do: get into a cavern-system and loot it. Adding to the experience, you share the system with another adventurer - The Thief - who does what Belloc will do to Indy in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yes that is a future-tense. This game is OLD SCHOOL.

This game lampshades the 1970s mimesis-breaking tropes from Advent and Scott "Not Dilbert" Adams like the risk of falling down a pit in a dark room where - when the lights come back on - there are no fucking pits. In Zork, you get eaten by grues - from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth Saga.

In 1979 these four figured they could make some bank off this thing and formed Infocom, to sell it. Except "it" had to be a "them", since the nerds'd tinkered this game into a monster that would never fit on a single 1970s-era cassette or massive magnetic disc. Oh those were the days. So: Zork I, II, and III.

It made the Infocom doodz filthy stinking rich until they dumped all their money into making business software, like idiots.

There was later a Zork Zero with some graphical stuff which was okay, and spinoffs like the Enchanter series which was awesome. Activision bought the rights to Zork and to the Infocom name, producing Return to Zork which was badly flawed (although a moneymaker); Cecilia Barajas' Nemesis which was great and terrifying - but not in the Zork spirit; and finally Margaret Stohl's Zork Grand Inquisitor which was a laugh riot but nobody bought. Do please at least play that last one.

Quite a few Memes got their start from the Zork universe. Want some rye? COURSE YA DO.

As to the game itself - there are some problems with it, which problems the authors should have figured out from Advent but didn't. Like: the maze of twisty passages all alike. Likewise: "Tower Of Hanoi" where you have insufficient inventory-space to carry all your shit from A to B, so you have to juggle putting some of your stuff HERE and the rest THERE. Since we've already seen such "puzzles" we do not need to go through it again. Inexperienced designers of role-playing dungeons get tempted to do some of this, too (Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits is a twisty-passage offender). Please do not do this.