Zork I

The forefather of modern adventure games, Zork brought the genre to the masses. I have begun this game many times, wandered the dark and dusty halls of the Great Underground Empire, only to get completely stuck and put it back on the shelf. Finally, after my wife helped me finish playing through Trinity, we tackled this adventure again and completed it!

There are certainly puzzles here that haven't aged well (e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)figuring out you need to give the egg to the thief or (Spoiler - click to show)defeating the cyclops) but for the most part after a little experimentation and discovering the types of interactions the game expects you to take, most of it is well structured.

There is effectively no story to speak of, and the few other living creatures you encounter are hostile obstacles to bypass, but the immersion here is top notch. The descriptions are not necessarily grandiose and examining the vast majority of objects only states that they are nothing special, but the writing is just detailed enough to let your mind fill in the blanks mostly without even noticing. You feel like you're delving deeper and deeper into damp, rocky caves and where evidence of civilization lies, it's rough, dusty, and abandoned. Unlike the sequel, there is not a huge variety of locations, but each room is exactly distinct enough that you'll start to remember where it is on your map very quickly (you **are** drawing a map, right?!).

Zork isn't a very cruel game, but it will seem like it is until you wrap your head around how the world works (the occasional poorly designed puzzle excepted). It definitely doesn't hold your hand. While I'm usually a fan of starting at the beginning, Zork is difficult enough and the learning curve steep enough that I'm not sure I would recommend it as an entry point into the genre for beginners unless they are already excited and eager to take on the challenge. That said, not having played very many interactive fiction games, I don't yet have an opinion of a better one. Certainly, if you can look beyond the lack of guidance and get immersed in the world the prose reveals, there are many mysteries and adventures Zork I offers.

Zork 1 is straight up GANGSTA, yo! If you can beat this game without hints then you are, without a doubt, one of the smartest people.

Back in 1984 when my folks bought me my first home computer (IBM PCjr) I was 15. Zork was the second PC game that I bought for the new computer. The first was Sir-Tech's <==== W I Z A R D R Y ! ===[--o ... an early computer RPG modeled after Dungeons & Dragons. I was very into D&D and so naturally I wanted to experience adventure on my computer.

Zork is kind of like D&D, in a way. You use a sword to fight monsters. You collect treasure. There are lots of traps and puzzles. Kind of like D&D modules were at the time.

And then it had the humor. The interesting history of the Great Underground Empire. The quirky responses to things. And treasure. Treasure was always fun back in the 80's.

This game has a special nostalgic value for me, of course, but I still feel this game holds up pretty well. Sure, it's absolutely CRUEL and brutal. It is a real challenge. This game isn't going to make you think or ponder life's mysteries or give a happy feel good comedy time. No, it's going to kick you in the private parts. Again. And Again. Until you quit, because you just can't handle it. Or until you smile after hours and hours of careful plodding, restoring, exploring, and eventually, winning!

It took me years but I did eventually beat Zork 1, then 2, and even 3. I did play a bit of Zork Zero and a few of the others in the more graphical parts of the series. Grand Inquisitor is super funny (never beat it). They all have adventuring and quirky flavor that is unique to the GUE setting and related areas. There's a lot to like about the series, overall, so why not start with the first one, the grandaddy of them all, ZORK I.

You know you want to. Go ahead. The house is right there.

It was the original mainframe Zork from the 1980's which showed me that text adventures could do more than just the two word commands of the Scott Adams adventures. The breadth of the dungeon was astounding and I loved the variety of puzzles. My eighth grade self loved the experience.

Zork I reduced the original Zork into bitesized puzzles. I helped my nephews through this dungeon crawl over the past few months, only giving advice when the puzzle just wasn't well clued and I wanted to save them from trying everything. There is a nice feeling of exploring caves but there is so much that just doesn't make sense. The puzzles surrounding the (Spoiler - click to show)egg were particularly well-made.

Although this is a classic game that deserves all of the praise for inspiring so many to write IF, it just isn't that much fun as a game in 2022. Enchanter & Planetfall do a much better job of giving motivation beyond just gathering treasures.

I'm trying to work my way through the Infocom catalog, posting my thoughts on a gaming forum all the while.

I started with Zork I, and I suppose it's easy to give it a hard time. The plot is more than thin--a monofilament of a story. The protagonist, an indeterminate blank slate, reaches a small white house in the midst of a forest. Reading the manual(s) accompanying Zork I, the player is told that the Adventurer wants treasure for themselves. The game will award points for collecting it and placing it in a trophy case.

Why does the Adventurer leave the treasure behind, if they want it so much? What is the significance of the case, unremarkably sitting in an unremarkably abandoned house?

In the course of their treasure hunt, the player-protagonist wanders a rather inorganic funhouse of a map, looking for things to do, solving puzzles until all rooms and treasures are discovered.

One of the means of fast travel, while convenient, has no apparent clues as to its use.

Zork has an expiring light source, though sooner or later an alternative may or may not be found.

There are a whopping three mazes, none of them fun or interesting. The largest and most tedious, called only "Maze," features 12 possible exits from each of its rooms as well as an NPC that picks up and moves dropped items--the Hansel and Gretel approach will not work here. Wise players will swallow their pride and retrieve a map from somewhere. Mapping this monstrosity is in no way worth the trouble.

It's easy to forget that the design of Zork was initially undertaken in order to improve upon ADVENT, which was then the only widely-known game of its kind. I suppose this may be a controversial statement: Zork does, in fact, improve upon ADVENT in almost every meaningful way. It is more technologically sophisticated, running on an engine that eventually evolved into one that is widely used today in contemporary IF. It has a sense of humor. It is, compared with its only competitor at the time, more interactive and more descriptive. The puzzles--the fair ones, at least--are more interesting than those in ADVENT. I have seen essays indicating that ADVENT makes fewer mistakes, but then again there is far less of it to begin with.

The parser at the time was a revelation. In ADVENT, the player DROPs treasures on the floor. In Zork, the player PUTs them in a CONTAINER.

We are lucky that Zork made so many mistakes, thus sparing future efforts the indignity of making them. It was not yet clear what made adventure games fun, but Zork was the first step in figuring that out.

This is not to say that parts of it are not fun. I particularly enjoyed the "bell, book, and candle" and coal mine puzzles.

Zork is worth playing for the sense of context it provides. If its outdated nature annoys, then the invisiclues z-code is legally available at The Infocom Documentation Project, free of charge. I found it satisfying to solve, but I think just looking around is worthwhile for the curious.

I give no rating for Zork. I'm not sure that measuring it against contemporary standards is relevant.

I would rather read read the Catcher in the Rye a thousand times than be forced to play this again. Sucked

This text adventure is essential and it is a must-to-play for every IF fanatics due to its hystorical importance.

But from an technical/artistic point of view, it's very difficult, unfair, sometimes illogical and frustrating (maze, inventory).

In spite of its fame it's not the pinnacle of the genre, but it keeps its legendary charm despite its 50 years of age.

This Adventure is something that you have to play. I remember being a young child on my parent's 386. Spending my summer days trying to solve the puzzles. It makes me yearn to be young again. But now I'm a father and my two kids are just discovering Infocom.

If you've never played 'Zork 1' before, give it a spin. As for myself, 'Zork 1' is the first interactive fiction game I've ever played. Maybe it isn't the friendliest game for beginners of IF, but I'm personally glad that I began with this clasic masterpiece.

What 'Zork 1' did well, in my opinion, is that it hooked me right away. The opening scene - and this is not a spoiler, it's the start of the game - where the player is placed in front of a mysterious white house is purely brilliant. My brother and I, who I first played this with, would brag to each other via text who made it furthest into the game. It was thrilling to text to him that 'Hey! I made it past the house!' or 'I did it - I killed (Spoiler - click to show)that horrible thief!'

So maybe it was the rivalry I had ongoing with my brother in playing this game that made it so exciting and gratifying to me on my first play, but 'Zork 1' really is clever when it comes to its presentation of exploration and surprise.

Don't miss this one.

Yes, Zork was the most important computer game of the early 1980’s. Perhaps even more important than King’s Quest. "You are standing in an open field, west of a white house," is quite possibly the most well-known line in adventure game history. It laid the foundation for many wonderful things to come. And it was an incredibly impressive, engaging adventure when it was released. But other than nostalgia, it has little going for it after all these years.

A simple treasure hunting expedition can actually be a welcome relief from more story-based games, but Zork breaks so many conventional rules of modern game play that most fans of current interactive fiction would rip it to shreds were it released today. First, there’s the pointless maze (of twisty little passages, all alike). Then there’s the random enemy encounters and random battle elements. There are several ways to lock one’s self from victory without even realizing it, and a few puzzles are so poorly clued (or not clued at all) that it doesn’t matter anyway. And all that onto a time limit (due to a finite light source, at least early on), and you have one maddening game.

To be fair, the atmosphere still holds up well after all these years. The parser is impressively strong. And a few of the puzzles are rather ingenious. But I don’t have patience any longer for the aforementioned annoyances. Zork used to be a giant, but so many others have piled on top of its shoulders that it has weakened considerably. Still, I would recommend this to those who do have an interest in seeing how computer gaming first exploded in the market.

I really enjoyed playing through this game again this year (after having played, but not beaten it back in the 1980s). Yes, I understand how the phrase "Zork hates its player" came about, but at least because the tasks are compartmentalized and getting back to where you last were doesn't take more than a few minutes that it doesn't feel like a major setback to blow yourself up when you weren't expecting it. I had fun puzzling through everything (or at least most things, I had to cheat to figure out (Spoiler - click to show)the secrets of the egg) and even making the maps on my own, though I can see how those can become tedious as well.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed myself and look forward to picking up Zork 2 and 3 for the first time ever, soon.