Zork

For other uses, see Zork (disambiguation).

Zork
Zork I Atari ST cover art
Developer(s)	Infocom
Publisher(s)	Personal Software Infocom Activision
Designer(s)	Tim Anderson Marc Blank Dave Lebling Bruce Daniels
Programmer(s)	Tim Anderson Marc Blank Dave Lebling Bruce Daniels
Engine	ZIL
Platform(s)	PDP-10, Atari 8-bit family, Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, Commodore 128, CP/M, TRS-80, IBM PC, Apple II, Apple IIe, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, DOS, TRS-80, NEC PC-9801, MSX, PlayStation, Sega Saturn
Release	1977 (PDP-10) 1980 (Zork I) 1981 (Zork II) 1982 (Zork III)
Genre(s)	Text adventure
Mode(s)	Single-player

Zork is one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games, with roots drawn from the original genre game, Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written in 1977–1979 using the MDL programming language on a DEC PDP-10 computer. The authors — Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling — were members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling Group.

When Zork was published commercially, it was split up into three games: Zork: The Great Underground Empire - Part I (later known as Zork I), Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master.

Zork distinguished itself in its genre as an especially rich game, in terms of both the quality of the storytelling and the sophistication of its text parser, which was not limited to simple verb-noun commands ("hit troll"), but recognized some prepositions and conjunctions ("hit the troll with the Elvish sword").

Story

Setting

Zork is set in "the ruins of an ancient empire lying far underground". The player is a nameless adventurer "who is venturing into this dangerous land in search of wealth and adventure". The goal is to return from the "Great Underground Empire" alive with the treasures, ultimately inheriting the title of Dungeon Master. The dungeons are stocked with many novel creatures, objects and locations, among them grues, zorkmids, and Flood Control Dam #3—all of which are referenced by subsequent Infocom text adventures.

FrobozzCo International is a fictional monopolous conglomerate from the game. FrobozzCo products are littered throughout all Zork games, often with humorous effect.

Plot

Zork I

The game takes place in the Zork calendar year 948 GUE (although the passage of time is not notable in gameplay). The player steps into the deliberately vague role of an "adventurer". The game begins near a white house in a small, self-contained area. Although the player is given little instruction, the house provides an obvious point of interest.

When the player enters the house, it yields a number of intriguing objects: an ancient brass lantern, an empty trophy case, an intricately engraved sword, etc. Beneath the rug a trap door leads down into a dark cellar. But what initially appears to be a cellar is actually one of several entrances to a vast subterranean land—the Great Underground Empire. The player soon encounters dangerous creatures, including deadly grues, an axe-wielding troll, a giant cyclops and a nimble-fingered thief. This man makes mapping the maze difficult because he removes things you put down in the rooms to navigate by. Yet he has an important use.

The ultimate goal of Zork I is to collect the Twenty Treasures of Zork and install them in the trophy case. Finding the treasures requires solving a variety of puzzles such as the navigation of two brutal mazes and some intricate manipulations at Flood Control Dam #3.

Placing all of the treasures into the trophy case scores the player 350 points and grants the rank of "Master Adventurer." An ancient map with further instructions then magically appears in the trophy case. These instructions provide access to a stone barrow. The entrance to the barrow is the end of Zork I and the beginning of Zork II.

It is possible to score all 350 points in 223 moves (and win the game completely in 228 moves) by exploiting a bug.

Zork II

The player begins in the Barrow from Zork I armed only with the trusty brass lantern and sword of elvish antiquity. The purpose of the game is not initially clear.

The Wizard of Frobozz is soon introduced. The wizard was once a respected enchanter, but when his powers began to fade he was exiled by Dimwit Flathead. Now bordering on senility, the wizard is still a force to be reckoned with. Your goal, as you venture into the wizard's realm, is to avoid his capricious tricks and learn to control his magic.

Like its predecessor, Zork II is essentially a treasure hunt. Unlike the previous game, the ten treasures are tied together by a crude plot. Finding the treasures does not end the game, nor are all the treasures needed to finish the game. Instead, the adventurer must figure out a way to use the treasures in order to reach the game's finale.

Zork III

The player begins at the bottom of the Endless Stair from Zork II.

Zork III is somewhat less of a straightforward treasure hunt than previous installments. Instead, the player—in the role of the same "adventurer" played in Zork I and Zork II—must demonstrate worthiness to assume the role of the Dungeon Master.

The player must get past the Guardians of Zork, with the complete garb of the Dungeon Master, and then endure a final test. The player must be wearing the amulet (found at the bottom of the lake), the cloak and hood (received when the player chooses to look under the hood of the vanquished opponent in the Land of Shadow rather than deal the final blow), the staff (received from the man at the Cliff for helping him retrieve the chest of valuables; attacking the man in any way or trying to take the valuables from him inevitably breaks the staff), the strange key (found in the Key Room when the player uses the grue repellent (from Zork II) to get past the dark places), the royal ring (retrieved from the Royal Museum by using the gold machine to travel back to the year 776 GUE), and the black book (found in the Royal Puzzle).

Unlike Zork I and Zork II there is a time-sensitive event, an earthquake which is randomly triggered about 130 turns into gameplay. The player must retrieve the key before the earthquake (when the Aqueduct is broken, leaving no escape route from the Key Room) and can't complete the Royal Puzzle or retrieve the ring until after the earthquake (when the unopenable Great Door breaks). Also unlike the previous two Zork games, the lantern is of little relevance. It is needed only to walk through the dark areas of the Junction, Creepy Crawl and Foggy Room at the beginning of the game (often done after completing the Land of Shadow, Cliff, and Flathead Ocean—saying "Hello, Sailor" to the Viking yields an invisibility vial—tasks). Another light source, the torch from the Scenic Vista, is used to retrieve the repellent from Zork II and deposit it in the Damp Passage via the teleportation table to provide a light source for the return journey after retrieving the key.

Once the player has all the items, they must give the waybread to the elderly man in the Engravings Room to find the doorway leading to the final hallway. Here the "elvish sword of great antiquity" is used to block the beam in the Beam Room. Next the adventurer must get through the Guardians of Zork. This can either be accomplished by using the complicated Mirror Box or by simply drinking the invisibility potion in the vial from the Flathead Ocean. When the player knocks on the Dungeon Master's door he will only open it if the player is fully equipped (see above). He then tells the adventurer that he will obey their commands. The corridors lead to a parapet which overlooks the fiery cells. Reading the book here reveals a map of "The Dungeon and Treasury of Zork" which has 8 cells, one of which with a bronze door that leads to the Treasury of Zork. The eight positions of the dial in the parapet correspond to the 8 cells. The adventurer must use trial and error at this point to summon the cell with the bronze door and have the dungeon master return it to its original position by replacing it with any other cell. The key will now unlock the door revealing the Treasury of Zork, which contains the wealth of the Great Underground Empire as well as a controlling share in FrobozzCo International. After this victorious discovery, the Dungeon Master appears and transforms the player into a duplicate of himself, signifying the player's succession to his position.

Commands

File:Screenshot of Zork running on Frotz through iTerm 2 on Mac OSX.png

Screenshot of the beginning of Zork

In the Zork games, the player is not limited to verb-noun commands, such as "take lamp", "open mailbox", and so forth. Instead, the parser supports more sophisticated sentences such as "put the lamp and sword in the case", "look under the rug", and "drop all except lantern". The game understands many common verbs, including "take", "drop", "examine", "attack", "climb", "open", "close", "count", and many more. The games also support commands to the game directly (rather than taking actions within the fictional setting of the game) such as "save" and "restore", "script" and "unscript" (which begin and end a text transcript of the game text), "restart", and "quit".

Development

"Zork" was originally MIT hacker slang for an unfinished program. The implementors briefly named the completed game Dungeon, but changed it back to Zork after receiving a trademark violation notice from the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons. Zork has been adapted to a book series.

Three of the original Zork programmers joined with others to found Infocom in 1979. That company adapted the PDP-10 Zork into Zork I-III, a trilogy of games for most popular small computers of the era, including the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the Commodore Plus/4, the Atari 8-bit family, the TRS-80, CP/M systems, and the IBM PC. Zork I was published on 5¼" and 8" floppy disks. Joel Berez and Marc Blank developed a specialized virtual machine to run Zork I, called the Z-machine. The first "Z-machine Interpreter Program" ZIP for a small computer was written by Scott Cutler for the TRS-80. The trilogy was written in ZIL, which stands for "Zork Implementation Language", a language similar to LISP. Personal Software published what would become the first part of the trilogy under the name Zork when it was first released in 1980, but Infocom later handled the distribution of that game and their subsequent games. Part of the reason for splitting Zork into three different games was that, unlike the PDP systems the original ran on, microcomputers did not have enough memory and disk storage to handle the entirety of the original game. In the process, more content was added to Zork to make each game stand on its own.

Dungeon

In late 1977 a hacker obtained a copy of the Zork source code, which was subsequently spread. The leaked Zork source code was later used by Bob Supnik, a programmer from Digital Equipment Corporation, to create a Fortran IV port, which allowed the game to run on the smaller DEC PDP-11. In late 1977 the Zork authors had decided to rename Zork to Dungeon, and Supnik subsequently released his port as Dungeon in January 1978. Somewhere in 1978 the Zork developers received notice from Tactical Studies Rules, who claimed that the name Dungeon infringed their trademark rights, and they subsequently changed the name back to Zork. When Zork became a commercial product at Infocom, Infocom agreed that if an Infocom copyright notice was put on the Fortran version, noncommercial distribution would be allowed. This Fortran version, and C translations thereof, have been included in several Linux distributions.

The Fortran version of Dungeon was widely available on DEC VAXes, being one of the most popular items distributed by DECUS. It went through multiple modifications both to incorporate more features from the original and to track changes in the MDL version. In the late 1980s, the Fortran version was extensively rewritten for VAX Fortran and became fully compatible with the last MDL release. It had one extra joke: an apparent entrance to the Mill (a reference to DEC's headquarters) that was, in fact, impassable.

It also had a gdt command (game debugging technique, a reference to the DDT debugger) which enabled the player to move any object (including the player) to any room. Use of gdt required answering a random question requiring deep knowledge of the game. The game's response to a wrong answer (“A booming voice says ‘Wrong, cretin!’ and you notice that you have turned into a pile of dust”) appears in many "fortune cookie" databases.

The Fortran version was also included in the distribution media for some Data General operating systems. It was used as an acceptance test to verify that the OS had been correctly installed. Being able to compile, link, and run the program demonstrated that all of the run-time libraries, compiler, and link editor were installed in the correct locations.

Releases

The original version of Zork I was published by Personal Software and simply called Zork. It was distributed in clear plastic bags containing only the game disk and a 36-page booklet. Infocom's first "self-published" version of Zork I was in the so-called "Folio" format which included a single piece of paper describing how to run the game. The feelies noted above were only introduced when Zork I was re-released in the "Grey box" format.

Zork I was one of five Infocom games that were re-released in Solid Gold format with in-game hints.

There is also an abridged version, called Mini-Zork I, dated November 24, 1987. It was released free of charge as a promotion.

A German language version was developed, but never released. An unfinished version of this story file, dated January 13, 1988, has made its way into public circulation. The German is evidently non-native, containing many spelling and grammar errors. It is known that Jeff O'Neill worked on this version.

A remastered version of Zork I: The Underground Empire (name in Japan:Zork I 大きい地下帝国) [ was released by Activision for the Sega Saturn and PlayStation in 1996. This Japanese version includes graphics, sound effects, auto-mapping, and music by Yuzo Koshiro. This version was never released outside Japan. It was also included in Call of Duty: Black Ops, there's an easter egg where you can get out of the chair at the title screen and walk around and there is a computer behind you and when you get on the computer you type in "zork" and you are playing the full version of Zork I: The Underground Empire.

Trivia

Zork I

Screenshot of Zork I running on Gargoyle, a modern interpreter

The opening text of Zork I is among the most notable descriptions in video games:

West of House

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

This is quite simplistic when compared to Infocom's later games, many of which started with screens full of introductory text.

Several of the game's situations and descriptions have become iconic within the field of interactive fiction, such as the brass lantern and the "Elvish sword of great antiquity".

Zork I also introduced the notable grue, a "sinister, lurking presence" who kills adventurers who go exploring in the dark. Grues appeared (or, at least, were mentioned) in many subsequent Infocom adventures, right up to the 1997 graphic adventure Zork Grand Inquisitor, published by Activision.

Zork II

Zork II contains the difficult Bank of Zork vault puzzle, in which the player must walk through what appear to be solid walls. In this puzzle, the player controls his or her destination depending on the direction from which he or she entered the room. The game also includes the "Oddly-Angled Room" puzzle, which relied upon the player being familiar with baseball. Infocom apologized for the American-centric puzzle in their official hints for the game. The Bank of Zork and Oddly-Angled Room puzzles have been called "infamously difficult."

If a player gets stranded on a volcano ledge (e.g., by forgetting to tie the balloon to the hook), after some time a "volcano gnome" appears:

A volcano gnome seems to walk straight out of the wall and says, "I have a very busy appointment schedule and little time to waste on trespassers, but for a small fee, I'll show you the way out". You notice the gnome nervously glancing at his watch.

Similarly, if the player gets trapped in the bank, another gnome appears:

An epicene gnome of Zurich wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a safety-deposit box materializes in the room. "You seem to have forgotten to deposit your valuables," he says, tapping the lid of the box impatiently. "We don't usually allow customers to use the boxes here, but we can make this ONE exception, I suppose..." He looks askance at you over his wire-rimmed bifocals.

If the adventurer puts non-valuable items in the box, the gnome tosses them out and they disappear. If the adventurer doesn't give the gnome something valuable after a while, he will leave the player stranded. If the adventurer presents the lit brick (bomb) a suitably amusing response is made, followed also by abandonment.

Zork III

Compared to the other games in the series, the scoring system is unusual in that it measures the player's "potential", and is not simply a reflection of the number of treasures found. Points are awarded for taking creative steps toward solving problems rather than actually solving them (e.g. jumping in the lake earns the adventurer a point, but successfully taking the amulet on the bottom of the lake does not). This system makes it possible for the player to have all 7 points without being close to finishing the game.

This game contains the payoff to the "Hello, Sailor" joke that was introduced in Zork I. Saying hello sailor has the effect of:

The seaman looks up and maneuvers the boat toward shore. He cries out "I have waited three ages for someone to say those words and save me from sailing this endless ocean. Please accept this gift. You may find it useful!" He throws something which falls near you in sand, then sails off toward the west, singing a lively, but somewhat uncouth, sailor song.

For the rest of the game, saying hello sailor elicits the response Nothing happens anymore. Everywhere else, saying hello sailor induces the response, Nothing happens here.

A gold machine (known as the "Temporizer") is used to travel through time. According to the Zork Nemesis strategy guide, Zork Nemesis is caused by using of the machine. The name's shortened form, "golmac", is the name of one of the spells in Sorcerer.

Feelies

Infocom did not begin their tradition of including feelies, or extra items related to a game, until the Template:Vgy release Deadline. Later re-releases of the game, however, were packaged with:

• The booklet The Great Underground Empire: A History, by "Froboz Mumbar"
• A map roughly corresponding to a portion of the game's area

Although the back of the Zork I "Grey box" depicted a zorkmid coin included with the other feelies, production difficulties led to the coins' omission from the packages. Zorkmid coins were not included as feelies until the release of the Zork Trilogy boxed set.

Reception

Zork I

BYTE praised the sophisticated parser and quality of writing. It stated "That the program is entertaining, eloquent, witty, and precisely written is almost beside the point ... Zork can be felt and touched—experienced, if you will—through the care and attention to detail the authors have rendered".

Zork I was Infocom's first game, and sold 378,987 copies by 1986.

Zork II

PC Magazine stated that "Zork II's appeal is universal" and that the game was "a challenge. It is interesting, difficult, frustrating, and most of all, enjoyable. For those who have plenty of time, the game is endlessly amusing".

Legacy

Sequels

The Enchanter trilogy:

• Enchanter (1983, Infocom)
• Sorcerer (1984, Infocom)
• Spellbreaker (1985, Infocom)

Games that take place somewhere in the Zork universe:

• Wishbringer: The Magick Stone of Dreams (1985, Infocom)

The Zork Anthology comprises the original Zork Trilogy plus:

• Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor (1987, Infocom)
• Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz (1988, Infocom)

The Zork Quest series:

• Zork Quest: Assault on Egreth Castle (1988, Infocom, interactive computer comic book)
• Zork Quest: The Crystal of Doom (1989, Infocom, interactive computer comic book)

After a five year hiatus, the following games were produced:

• Return to Zork (1993, Infocom/Activision)
• The Philosopher's Stone (Activision, unfinished text prequel to Zork Nemesis)
• Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands (1996, Activision)
• Zork: The Undiscovered Underground (1997, written by Michael Berlyn and Marc Blank (original Infocom implementors) and released by Activision to promote the release of Zork Grand Inquisitor)
• Zork Grand Inquisitor (1997, Activision)

The Enchanter trilogy and Wishbringer occupy somewhat unusual positions within the Zork universe. Enchanter was originally developed as Zork IV; Infocom decided to instead release it separately, however, and it became the basis of a new trilogy. (In each trilogy, there is a sense of assumed continuity; that is, the player's character in Zork III is assumed to have experienced the events of Zork I and Zork II. Similarly, events from Enchanter are referenced in Sorcerer and Spellbreaker; but the Enchanter character is not assumed to be the same one from the Zork trilogy. In fact, in Enchanter the player's character encounters the Adventurer from Zork, who helps the player's character solve a puzzle in the game.) Although Wishbringer was never officially linked to the Zork series, the game is generally agreed to be "Zorkian" due to its use of magic and several terms and names from established Zork games.

Compilations and adaptations

Among the games bundled in The Lost Treasures of Infocom, published in 1991 by Activision under the Infocom brand, were the original Zork trilogy, the Enchanter trilogy, Beyond Zork and Zork Zero. A second bundle published in 1992, The Lost Treasures of Infocom II, contained Wishbringer and ten other non-Zork-related games. Activision's 1996 compilation, Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom, includes all the text-based Zork games; the Zork and Enchanter trilogies, Wishbringer, Beyond Zork and Zork Zero. Activision briefly offered free downloads of Zork I as part of the promotion of Zork: Nemesis, and Zork II and Zork III as part of the promotion for Zork Grand Inquisitor, as well as a new adventure: Zork: The Undiscovered Underground.

Four gamebooks, written by S. Eric Meretzky and taking place in the Zork universe, were published in 1983-4 by Tor Books in the US and Canada, and Puffin in the UK: The Forces of Krill (1983), The Malifestro Quest (1983), The Cavern of Doom (1983), Conquest at Quendor (1984). Together, these are known as the Zork books.

Infocom adapted the games into a series of books. Of six novels published as "Infocom Books" by Avon Books between 1988–1991, four were directly based on Zork: Wishbringer by Craig Shaw Gardner (1988), Enchanter by Robin W. Bailey (1989), The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger (1990) and The Lost City of Zork by Robin W. Bailey (1991),

References in media

In the TV series Chuck, Zork is mentioned as a game that the title character and his friend, also a CIA agent, used to play when they were younger. Commands from the game were used in operations by the characters.

In the Big Bang Theory episode "The Hofstadter Isotope", Sheldon mentions it as the game they are going to play on Friday "Chinese and vintage video game" night.

In Call of Duty: Black Ops, there is an easter egg where the player can wiggle out of your torture chair and then walk over to an old computer behind the game mode television. If the player types zork at the first command line, it will boot up the actual game.

In Call of Duty: Ghosts, the filename "zork.exe" appears during the download of files from a computer.

A 3D, immersive version of Zork appears as the "quest" to complete for the Jade Key in the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

On March 12, 2007, The New York Times reported that Zork was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, the so-called game canon. The Library of Congress took up a video game preservation proposal and began with the games from this list, including Zork.

See also

• Legends of Zork, an online, browser-based spin-off
• 69105, a number that became somewhat of an in-joke in several Infocom games
• The Lurking Horror, another Infocom IF, that references Zork.
• Grue, the infamous Zork monster
• The Meteor, the Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet, the winner of the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition, is strongly influenced by the Zork universe and includes many elements.

References

Further reading

• Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages. MIT Press, 2003. ISBN 0-262-13436-5.

External links

• Play Zork online at THCNET's interactive 404 error page.
• Download and play the original mainframe version of Zork, as well as a 1982 map of the Zork universe.
• Early source code for the ITS mainframe, retrieved from http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html
• Template:Dmoz
• Archived 2013-05-14 at the Wayback Machine
• The History Of Zork — Article by Matt Barton
• Retroist Zork Podcast
• Zork I, II and III — Review of Commodore 64 (disk edition) in Zzap64, August 1985
• Implementing UEFI Boot to Zork — LWN.net, September 23, 2013
• Zork: The Great Underground Empire at MobyGames
• Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz at MobyGames
• Zork III: The Dungeon Master at MobyGames
• Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (PS & Saturn) at MobyGames
• Infocom-if.org's entry for Zork I
• Infocom-if.org's entry for Zork II
• Infocom-if.org's entry for Zork III
• Zork I review at Adventure Classic Gaming