ZORK

ZORK

-- mookieproof (mookieproo...), September 1st, 2004.

GOD BLESS YOU

NO I WAS PLAYING ZORK DUMBASS

The last text-based one, yeah. But in the age of CD-ROM came:

Return to Zork (1993), which was ropy, but not bad for the time, and had several great lines which are still running gags between me and my sister - "Want some rye? Course you do!"..."I've only got one milk cow, and she ONLY EATS CARROTS!"...etc.

Zork Nemesis (1996), which was actually a really decent myst-style game. If you could ever bring yourself to play Myst-style games. But it was a bit over serious, and didn't really feel like a Zork game.

Zork Grand Inquisitor (1997). Which I never played much of. If I remember rightly though, it starred Dirk Benedict.

And then it stopped, I think

Tough shit, asshole.

oh i am funny.

Hahaha yes. That was some funny shit. It reminds me of that film sampled in DJ Shadow's Entroducing: "That your dog? That's one cute lookin' pooch..."

Did anyone else wish they lived in Zork when they were young? I had the whole lush world constructed within my head, and today I discovered that it's still there.

I liked "Deadline", too. Pretty detailed game, for the times.

Also, if you're interested in modern interactive fiction, check out Adam Cadre's work. He's my personal fave.

http://geeklovesongs.com/music/Walkthrough.mp3

The next step in my quarantine regression is playing text-based adventures. Found a fun program (Trizbort) that makes mapping easy and fun and just blazed through Zork I and Zork II. So far I've remembered how to do everything, but that streak might end with Zork III, which I always struggled with. Then going to roll on with the Enchanter trilogy!

It's funny, I spent so much time in these as a kid, and as a result I remember them being far more text-heavy than they are... they're really quite terse! And also how certain locations in the game (such as the Top of the Volcano area in Zork II) remain fixed in my mind as distant, exotic locales compared to the Gazebo, which feels like home.

I was given an old computer from my grandfather when I was kid, don’t remember which model, with a copy of ZORK. Had no guidance at all, just the computer and that floppy disk. Many hours typing variations of “ZORK” “PLAY ZORK” “GO ZORK” into the command prompt. Never got to play it.

Your score would be 0 (total of 350 points), in 0 moves.
This score gives you the rank of beginner.

zork zero was the one that frustrated me the least as a kid since iirc you could actually get around the world a decent amount at the start without a bunch of gotchas

i have a great deal to say on this topic but there must be other interactive fiction threads here, right?

Hi f hazel, if you want any more recent recs then I can give you some.
I'm an IF dork.

i have a great deal to say on this topic but there must be other interactive fiction threads here, right?

Not that I can think of, really. There is the IF comp thread, which over the years has mostly just been me talking to myself: Rolling IF COMP

(My opinions on twine are a lot more nuanced than they come across there, I've got to say)

i have this one bookmarked but it's not exactly thriving Text adventure games

cool then, we can talk here, and if i repeat myself, well, that's ok

for a couple months, when i was preparing i think for some blog post or another on interactive fiction, i had the results of the 2019 "top interactive fiction of all time" survey open in a tab. sometimes i do that, just keep tabs open for months for things i mean to get to and when i close the tab it's saying no, i'm not getting to it anytime soon.

the survey results are here.

https://ifdb.tads.org/viewcomp?id=1lv599reviaxvwo7

turns out the post that references this is the start of my post on roger waters' 2020 re-recording of "two suns in the sunset", because that's how i write. here's a link if anybody wants to read it.

https://www.alanauch.org/wtob/2020/06/29/two-suns-in-the-sunset-2020/

i also wrote, about two months prior, a post on the soundtrack to zork. yes, there was a soundtrack to zork, and it's great.

https://weirdthingsonbetamax.blogspot.com/2020/05/unsung-video-game-soundtracks-zork.html

what i haven't written is that steve meretzky's zork zero is probably the infocom game that means the most to me. it's a deeply flawed game, driven by the need to shoehorn in as many pointless puzzles as possible, whether or not they make ludic sense. here's a towers of hanoi puzzle! here's one of those peg jumping games like the ones you can play at the table at cracker barrel if you don't want to talk to your family while waiting for your food!

jimmy maher, in his post on the game at

https://www.filfre.net/2016/04/zork-zero/

is critical, and fairly critical, i believe. zork zero has flaws that a game created at the time it was, by the creator who made it, aren't terribly defensible. that said, it is also, as a pure evocation of the original spirit of "adventure gaming", better than any other game i know, a collectathon where you run around a massive game world collecting random objects for no adequately motivated reason. at age 14 i absolutely _loved_ it. so much so that i went through three printer ribbons printing an entire game transcript out on our 9-pin dot matrix printer, sort of a terribly wasteful early version of a "longplay". for years afterwards i carted around with me this huge box of computer paper.

i keep meaning to get around to playing emily short's games - by the time she came on the scene i wasn't as closely involved with if. i probably won't. these days i crave something far more aligned with meaningless escapism, aimless wandering of a fantastic world where all the puzzles are both fun and optional.

Great post and interesting blogs, thanks Kate. That "best of" list is pretty all over the place to me, I'm not sure just counting number of appearances is a good polling strategy. But I will say that Emily Short is genuinely brilliant, Counterfeit Monkey is definitely my favourite, and while the puzzles aren't optional there are a few ways of approaching most (if not all) of them, and some of the things it lets you try are hilarious.

I'm definitely going to have to seek out that Zork soundtrack now.

stayed up until dawn finishing Zork III, what a pleasure... damn Royal Puzzle Room

Beyond Zork was fun - RPG-like stats and combat, and the puzzles weren't too hard. Spent a lot of time playing that, thirty years ago and it's still fresh in my mind.

emil.y I'd love some recs of recent IF games! I actually learned ALAN around 2000 and wrote a small game with it but at the moment I'm drawing a lot of pleasure from the nostalgia associated with playing the classic Infocom run from 1980-1987... especially the early days where the focus is really on mapping and treasure-gathering and the lineage from Colossal Cave Adventure is apparent. They have this intrinsic loneliness about them that I find soothing during quarantine, like in Zork you're alone exploring this giant abandoned empire, or Planetfall with its deserted planet.

I love Planetfall so much! I played Zorks when I was a kid but struggled with them. Then Moria came along and that was the end of my IF phase until adulthood

On to Enchanter now, one I rarely got to play as a kid so it's far more difficult! Well, not difficult, I was chugging along and then hit a complete brick wall. And this one's not even supposed to be very hard... stalled out at 150/400 points. I'll sleep on it.

Couldn't sleep, fired Frotz back up and got it done... this is a really well-designed game, I got unstuck by studying the map and focusing on the only area that didn't have a reason for being in the game yet at that point (the portrait gallery). also like to see the evolution of the requisite maze area, which is more puzzle than maze by this point. OK, time for Sorcerer! Well, tomorrow.

Finished Sorcerer this evening, it is very much in the lineage of early Zork (like Zork I it has two mazes, one of them also a mine) moreso than Enchanter was. Enchanter was almost Zelda-like in its disciplined approach to showing you the whole map early and having the path clearly delineated by your character's abilities (acquiring spells, in this case)... Sorcerer is a bunch of puzzles crammed together on a very thin pretext (Belboz is missing, go find him!) and the map is pure Zorkian chaos. But it's so much fun!

Excited to try Spellbreaker next, it is apparently considered the most difficult of the classic Infocom works.

interested in seeing if you have any opinions on the style differences between the writers!

i found zork and zork ii intensely frustrating because it felt full of little gotchas and demanded constant failure. are there any text adventures that 'flow' a little better?? or am i missing the point

Yeah Meretzky's hand is pretty apparent in Sorcerer vs Enchanter, if I'd played Planetfall recently it might be even moreso!

i found zork and zork ii intensely frustrating because it felt full of little gotchas and demanded constant failure. are there any text adventures that 'flow' a little better?? or am i missing the point

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand)

nah you aren't missing the point, that sort of thing is definitely bad design. most modern "interactive fiction" goes out of its way to avoid that sort of shit.

Modern text adventures tend to flow better, the Zork style (unapologetically provincial, unforgiving, and difficult) fell out of fashion a while ago (even LucasArts adventure games made a point of contrasting how their games didn't let you get killed so arbitrarily or allow player actions make the game unwinnable... they could still drive you mad with their obtuse puzzles, just... less so). I have mixed feelings about the trend towards playability, Graham Norton's Player Bill of Rights, etc... Zork to me is far more like Super Meat Boy or Celeste, the author is assuming you're going to play these games over and over again until you get them right.

(a lot of the original context that made Zork so popular has been lost, for example a good parser is taken for granted now but in 1980 being able to have that kind of back-and-forth with a computer was WOW for a lot of people)

yeah definitely.

i remember liking bureaucracy and hitchhiker's, though they still did have these almost easter-egg-like solutions to certain puzzles.

Modern text adventures tend to flow better, the Zork style (unapologetically provincial, unforgiving, and difficult) fell out of fashion a while ago (even LucasArts adventure games made a point of contrasting how their games didn't let you get killed so arbitrarily or allow player actions make the game unwinnable... they could still drive you mad with their obtuse puzzles, just... less so). I have mixed feelings about the trend towards playability, Graham Norton's Player Bill of Rights, etc... Zork to me is far more like Super Meat Boy or Celeste, the author is assuming you're going to play these games over and over again until you get them right.

― avellano medio inglés (f. hazel)

adam cadre did actually do a game with that premise some time back called "varicella", i enjoyed it quite a lot!

hitchhikers, to me, is a shining examples of games sabotaged by bad design. honestly, after reading about "starship titanic" it's a massive testament to meretzsky that the game is as good as it is.

the babel fish puzzle in particular is infamous. while it's technically "fair" nobody but nobody solves it. the thing that really put infocom ahead of companies like sierra is that they had a tendency to play-test their games to make sure they were actually solvable. this makes puzzles like the babel fish puzzle, which was _not_ adequately clued, and the infamous diamond puzzle from zork ii, even more noteworthy and egregious.

hitchhiker's was one of the best-selling infocom games ever, one of the only ones with sales up in zork i territory, and did _anybody_ get anywhere in that game after the babel fish puzzle?

Repping for Varicella here, I liked that a lot!

i don’t think i ever did. i did finish bureaucracy but i think i needed some clues.

xpost

I finished Hitchhiker's but I also hacked away at it for something like three years on and off... and I definitely got the solution to the Babel Fish from a friend or a magazine or something. The difficulty of that puzzle was compounded by it being at the beginning of the game!

Although in defense of the Babel Fish in terms of puzzle design, while I grant it would be a terrible thing to throw at an IF novice, if you've already beaten 2-3 Infocom games then once you manage to construct the first couple parts of the Babel Fish Rube Goldberg machine, it becomes pretty clear what the joke is, if not the actual solution. Not to say the reach didn't exceed grasp, since a multipart solution like that is very much compounded by parser issues. I think the Oddly-Angled Room in Zork II is worse! We solved that one without even realizing it had anything to do with baseball, just from brute-force mapping out directions that made the diamond in the floor glow brighter.

Although in defense of the Babel Fish in terms of puzzle design, while I grant it would be a terrible thing to throw at an IF novice, if you've already beaten 2-3 Infocom games then once you manage to construct the first couple parts of the Babel Fish Rube Goldberg machine, it becomes pretty clear what the joke is, if not the actual solution. Not to say the reach didn't exceed grasp, since a multipart solution like that is very much compounded by parser issues. I think the Oddly-Angled Room in Zork II is worse! We solved that one without even realizing it had anything to do with baseball, just from brute-force mapping out directions that made the diamond in the floor glow brighter.

― avellano medio inglés (f. hazel)

the oddly-angled room is the diamond puzzle i was referring to, and yes, it _is_ arguably worse

in terms of difficulty, again, infocom actively make the situation worse, because when they classified games by difficulty in late 1984, hitchhiker's was given the rating "standard". for reference, zork ii was classified as "advanced" - the scale went from "introductory", which was primarily used for children's games, then "standard", "advanced", and at the top "expert". they advertised hitchhiker's as being an easier game than it was for sales reasons.

for me the problem with the babel fish puzzle is not the puzzle itself, but in particular is the part of the solution involving, and here for once i'm going to use spoiler tags to prevent spoilers, the pile of junk mail. not only did one not even necessarily have the item, because one didn't pick up and carry anything that wasn't nailed down in a game with inventory limits, and because the planet it was on had been destroyed by aliens, but on the off chance you _did_ have it intuiting that that item would be the one to use on at that stage of the puzzle requires a leap of logic that is not at all remotely widespread. this was a problem of early puzzle design, particularly with lack of beta testing - "read the author's mind" puzzles were common and most authors thought of them as "fun".

and that's _before_ the part of the game that requires you to feed the dog the cheese sandwich in a timed part of the game wherein you're just trying to figure out how to get off the earth before it explodes, and if you don't do it oh did you want to win the game? too bad! i'm sure douglas was great at parties and he was a smart and funny guy but ludic design was not his thing

doubling back but just wanted to say: f.hazel beautifully otm about the volcano versus the gazebo in Zork II. the sense of "home" and "journey" was so vivid to me in so many games back then. relates to the "wow i'm FINALLY inside that door that's been locked since the start of the game" feeling --- what's in there will always be precious and never lose its mystique, even on replays.

the text adventure i probably spent the most time with was Adventure on my grand-dad’s Kaypro II. (ported to CP/M, naturally.) and i loved it. i don’t think i ever figured out the maze of twisty passages all alike. and i’m not sure i ever finished it. but i really loved it. there was a gentle humour behind it that i really connected with.

I loved the Hitchhiker's game but I came to it knowing its reputation, and was happy to use hints throughout after giving the puzzles an initial go. Not sure how I would have felt about it trying to play it like a "proper" game but as a novelty it rules.

Wishbringer was my introduction to IF, I tried it again a few years back and I get that nostalgia that you lot have with Zork, but for a lot of the older games I just can't cope with the limitations of the parsers.

As for newer IF recs, I'm assuming you're at least aware of things like Curses and Anchorhead? Here's some stuff more from the last 10 years:

* Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short. As mentioned above. This is primarily a language game, but the world is so deep and the possibilities so many that even if you don't usually like language games you'll probably be won over. Also, anything Short does is at least interesting, usually brilliant.

* Clorophyll by Steph Cherrywell. I'm a big fan of Cherrywell's writing, it has a real spark and life to it, and this one might be a good intro as it's a little more trad sci-fi than her B-movie/flapper comedies.

* Coloratura by Linnea Glasser. A game from an alien perspective. Good example of the possibilities of unusual PCs.

* Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing by Ryan Veeder. Veeder is another favourite, usually writing fairly short pieces, but with this one he's taken on an expansive, ostensibly puzzle-less environment that is meant for leisurely dips. There's a lot to discover here (though I did at times find the lack of push toward puzzles frustrating).

* Lydia's Heart by Jim Aikin. This one's a bit older, but was one of the first games that came to mind when I thought of modern games I like. A deep, pretty long horror.

* Superluminal Vagrant Twin by CEJ Pacian. This is another example of IF spinning off into other genres. It's basically a space-trading sim, but it's massive and *a romp*.

That's probably enough for now. I'm very much a parser games person, but I could try to think of some good twines if anyone wants, it is an important development if IF even if its not my gaming preference.

wow, thanks. what are twines??

Wishbringer was my introduction to IF, I tried it again a few years back and I get that nostalgia that you lot have with Zork

Brian Moriarty is pretty much one of the genre's masters, I need to add Wishbringer to my replay list (along with Loom!), Beyond Zork is already in the queue... did you ever read the novelization of Wishbringer by Craig Shaw Gardner? Not as good as the Enchanter novelization (but way better than the Planetfall one, which was dire) but might be good for nostalgia's sake.

I loved Hitchhiker's when I was a kid, I used to play it for hours.

what are twines??

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand)

I guess the best way to describe them is that they're more like hyperlink fiction? Not exactly CYOA but closer to that than parser games. There was a massive shift toward twine-based IF some years ago, which I was not into, buuuut it is accessible, there are some genuine communities forged from it, and some people are making properly interesting works with it.

And lol, no, f hazel, I haven't read any IF novels! I need to work harder to get full dork cred, it seems.

The Enchanter novelization does a pretty good job of expanding the Zork/Enchanter universe, arguably better in a lot of ways than the later Zorks managed to do!

is there a way to read blorb files (!!!) on iOS?

Frotz should be able to read those in its iOS app version

About a third of the way through Spellbreaker and it is amazing! Like a Celtic knotwork of problem solving... I can see why it's said to be the hardest Infocom game written. Glad they've ditched the need for food and drink that made Enchanter stressful and Sorcerer kept but thumbed its nose at with the Berzio potion. You still need to sleep, which I assume will eventually feature in one of the puzzles. I've located 6 cubes and acquired 4 but I literally need to sleep.

I played Hitchhiker's Guide when I was way too young to understand anything that was going on - I don't think I got farther than the "darkness" puzzle when you get on the Vogon ship, I kept assuming I'd missed something and just replayed the opening scenes over and over.

I remember the first adventure I solved on my own feeling like a massive achievement, it was a freebie Infocom-style game called Ditch Day Drifter which was probably quite easy and short compared to a lot of IF(as I recall there was only one instance where you could actually die), but the satisfaction of figuring it out without resorting to guides was immense.

My dad's green-screen Amstrad had one called Scapeghost where you play the spirit of a murdered detective that has to get revenge on his killers. I never finished despite having the hint sheet, as the final part required you to do everything in such a strict number of moves that it was practically impossible(or at least it didn't seem worth the effort of trying).

I'm sneaking in some Infocom time while I work from home, and my work tasks, being mostly emailing and using a text-based mainframe, have taken on a strange Zorkian quality.

the idea of IF is interesting to me, and i'd like to give it a go, but i know almost nothing about it, and i'm trying to read this thread, and frankly i'm sort of confused.

q: could i just download zork and start playing it ? do i need to know how to code or do technical things ? is there a good place to read about this stuff ? i'm googling and just ... am i overthinking this ?

You don't need to know how to code or do technical things, beyond installing a program that can run the games (I use Frotz, which has been ported to a truly amazing number of different platforms), and then downloading the games you want to play (Zork and other classic Infocom titles are easily found online). A big aspect of these games is mapping the world, so I recommend downloading a mapping utility like Trizbort unless you want to go old school with graph paper and pencil.

The genre died in the late 80s and then experienced a renaissance a few years later with people writing user-friendly authoring programs and a ton of games. The community is still pretty active... emil.y can offer more advice on which modern IF titles are worth checking out (modern meaning anything post-1993).

is there a way to read blorb files (!!!) on iOS?

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 19 August 2020 19:32 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Frotz should be able to read those in its iOS app version

― avellano medio inglés (f. hazel), Wednesday, 19 August 2020 19:43 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

This exchange cracks me up, for silly reasons

to expand I think back in the day there was still this 'lol, that site is called google' factor now it's just like, oh there's a new site called bloopblorp, sure I'll use bloopblorp, bloopblorp seems useful and like the next day you'll hear people in suits on cspan talking about their bloopblorp account (...)

― iatee, Monday, April 9, 2012 3:45 PM bookmarkflaglink

hahaha, I just spent the past week playing the Enchanter Trilogy, so I probably typed both frotz (cause an object to glow) and blorb (protect a small item) hundreds of times, as they're vital for avoiding getting eaten by grues or having your spell book stolen while you sleep. sound absolutely normal to me! playing Spellbreaker I probably typed blorple (explore an object's mystic connections) about a thousand times since Wednesday... my personal favorites just in terms of saying them out loud are caskly (make an item more perfect), fweep (turn into a bat), and vaxum (make a creature friendly to you).

i’ve got frotz.. now i don’t understand how to get the files into it

xp thanks, f. hazel !

Tracer, you mean using the iOS app?

Finished Spellbreaker the other night, had to consult the Invisiclues a couple of times (I couldn't be bothered with the twelve-coin problem, since shoehorned-in logic puzzles are not what I'm here for) but it definitely felt like a sort of masterwork of first-generation IF, featuring refined versions of lots of things from the Zork/Enchanter games and a narrative that sort of kicks away the ladder from narrative to let the game be all about solving puzzles. Also kindly avoids having any early decisions in-game from making winning it impossible... there's one thing close to that, but it's more about realizing an object is important, not the fact that's now unobtainable when you finally need it. Started on the Lurking Horror last night, which has sound effects(!) that scared the shit out of me when they started.

fh - yes!

It's a little clunky, but tap "Browse IFDB" at the top left, then search for the game you want. If it's not there, you need to find a download for it on the web (an FTP would probably work too). On the Browse IFDB screen, tap the globe at the bottom right to get the search window. Then enter the web address for .z5 file. This page has a fair amount of them. They're semi-abandonware, so there a lot of web sites that have them.

I don't know if it can handle DAT, RAR, or other archive formats... give it a try. Frotz in Windows knows what to do with them.

sorry for the lack of determiners, I really have been playing Infocom games all week!

I don't think I'm gonna ever dive into these again, but I really appreciate this revive. I got my Zork endgame tips from an older guy in my 80s RPG club, haven't revisited it since, but can still vividly remember many details including that stupid thing where you had to light a first match and let it go out before lighting a second one.