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Zork
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Zork Zero was the last Zork game to be written and designed by the original Infocom authors and design team. Bearing much in common with its predecessors, Zork Zero is mainly a treasure-hunt game, requiring the player to visit nearly every corner of the empire. Epic and expansive, Zork Zero is very enjoyable, and for the most part does not rely on the graphics in its interface, though a few graphical puzzles (including a Double Fannucci game) use the graphics to good effect. The game's biggest failing lies in so many of its puzzles revolving around copy protection questions instead of legitimate, in-game puzzle solving. Though in the overall timeline of the history of Quendor, Zork Zero seems to have been designed as a conclusion to one of the greatest and most influential of all computer gaming series. It should not be missed by anyone who wants to see how the story of Zork begins [A]nd how it ends.
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Zork was one of the first interactive fiction computer games and an early descendant of Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written in 1977–1979 on a DEC PDP-10 computer by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, and implemented in the MDL programming language. All four were members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling Group.
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Zork begins just as "Adventure" does, in a forest clearing, near a building. Both games feature puzzles involving locked grates, lethargic dragons, and mazes. One game features a wandering thief, the other a wandering pirate; one features a menacing dwarf, the other a menacing troll. Zork is unique... in that as the gamer solves the initial puzzles, gradually a back story begins to emerge. The Zork series (and the Enchanter series which followed later) were set in the ruins of the Great Underground Empire, once ruled by the Flathead clan. While later games would develop this theme into full-blown conflicts between white and black alchemy, or between magic and technology, the Flathead references in the original games were little more than comic asides.
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Infocom (the producers of Zork) went on to produce many more works of "interactive fiction" in many different genres: mysteries (Deadline, The Witness), science fiction (Planetfall, Starcross), fantasy (Enchanter, Wishbringer), etc. Infocom even adapted books into the form, producing a text-adventure version of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as adaptations of Shogun and Sherlock Holmes. Each work placed the player into the shoes (or the equivalent; A Mind Forever Voyaging casted the player as "PRISM", an artifically intelligent computer) of the protagonist, placed him at the beginning of the chain of events, and from there let the player fend for him or herself. The stories weren't really that diverse - the storylines consisted of a single optimal ending and several "dead endings" in which the hero dies, is arrested, or otherwise fails in his/her quest. Of course, Infocom's software was marketed as games rather than electronic fiction, so it could be argued that this form was adopted to appeal to its target audience.
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Zork is probably best known for standing on chairs. It just so happens that when upon a chair he belches out PopTart, Pez, & Push Up poems. like that he is the only poet ever to have his book [appropriately called "I am NOT a poet"] blurbed by Davy Jones, Dobie Gray, Wild Cherry & even Ron Jeremy. Of course, what do they know about poetry!? So he will ... drop the names of Hal Sirowitz, Roger Bonair Agard, & Gary Mex Glazner for writing book blurbs. Zork has Featured at most of the hottest poetry venues in the country including the Boston's Cantab, Worcester, MA's Java Hut, Providence AS220, Ann Arbor's Slam [Steve Marsh] and Chicago's legendary Green Mill where slam started.
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The concept for Zork was initially conceived in the late 1970s. Infocom itself ... had its roots at this time, in the form of a computer science research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The members of this group (Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Tim Anderson abd Bruce Daniels) began developing an interactive fiction game (at this stage a text-only game) and lo and behold, in June 1977, "Dungeon" was born.
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