1: It is pitch black.
2: You are likely to be
eaten by a grue
Additional Comments:
Zork - what a fascinating glimpse into the archaic years of video game adventuring. I remember owning Zork as a kid on an IBM Compatible, though to this day I have no idea how we came to own it. It was the family's first computer primary used by me, to play this mysterious and convoluted text adventure that I had very little to no understanding of, and my then step-dad for, I can only surmise, work related data processing...maybe? I know he wasn't playing Zork considering he's always been pretty anti-video game. Which is all the more curious as to why or how we had the game to begin with. All I know for certain is that whenever I booted it up, I'd first have to work my way through a lengthy directory tree while knowing next to nothing about DOS beyond a few simple commands - enough at least to start up Zork and I think to use a fairly simple word processor of the day.
So there I was, wide-eyed in front of a screen filled with yellow-ocher text set against a black screen pretending I understood these strange input commands that eventually led me to game far different from anything I had ever played on an Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, or even the few dust ups I've had with computer games in the past such as Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Oregon Trail. After executing the file, I'd find myself standing in a clearing facing a lonely mailbox and the iconic white house. The sheer magnitude of loneliness was overwhelming, and yet, it was expressed simply through text. I was left to my own devices to visualize the scenes as best I could using pure imagination since all I had to work with were brief, almost plain speak passages. Despite the graphical splendors of the NES, I was mesmerized by this simplistic approach to storytelling and gameplay. But I think there was more to Zork's mystique that enthralled me and kept me coming back for more.
Much like my lack of knowledge when it came to DOS, or hell, computers altogether, I was utterly clueless when it came to Zork. Furthering the whole cloud of confusion surrounding Zork's inexplicable appearance on our computer is that we had neither a box nor manual of any kind to support that this product ever existed outside of the computer itself. I've long had a theory that the game was pre-installed by whomever we got the computer from, a crackpot hypothesis in and of itself since I'm not entirely certain of the history regarding how the machine came into our hands as well. My best guess is that the whole setup came from one of my then step-dad's co-workers. It's all a dubious fog really. But it makes sense, considering, if my memory serves, I stumbled upon Zork by sheer accident wondering what some of the more exotic files were listed along the tree's various branches. Point is, here I had this game that relied completely on input commands and intelligently parsed text yet didn't have the slightest clue on how to operate anything within the game. Having no manual and no friends who were even remotely aware of the game several years before internet would even become a known thing outside of small societies of collegiate tech wizards spells nothing but hopeless disaster.
The only commands I could deduce from the simple paragraphs before me were the four cardinal directions - I'm not sure if I ever knew this was actually expanded to eight cardinal directions, let alone up/down or in/out - look, take, and that may be it. One of my bigger revelations may have been when I accidentally discovered you could shorthand the four directions with their respective initials: N, E, S, and W. Unfortunately, and anyone who's familiar with Zork, or any text adventure game, knows that four directions, along with the ability to look or pick something up, is going to get you all of nowhere.
As a result, my adventures through The Great Underground Empire consisted of losing my bearings in the forest surrounding the lone white house. I remember making simple maps, but the most I remember is House -> N to Forest and possibly some forest to the west. Hmph. I never managed to get inside the house or even see the cliffs and rainbow. I just kept wandering endlessly in some stupid forest. And come to think of it, I'm not entirely certain how I ever figured out that take was an acceptable command considering there are no items within the areas I could access that I could take, unless I was aware of open to open the mailbox, which the more I think about it, I think I was, or I figured out how to climb the tree to get the egg, which I'm far less certain I ever figured that out. Only reason I question open is that I never realized you could open the window, but then again, I don't recall ever finding the window. Sad, I know, considering all you need to do is N and W, and voilà: window! However, I vaguely recall the pamphlet inside the mailbox, so I must have known open, which would then lead to take.
So let's see: mailbox, white house, pamphlet, forest, and a clearing. That was the extent of my fabulous quest through The Great Underground Empire. Scratch that! I never even made it underground - Great Underground Empire... Ridiculous.
Twenty-five years later and I have finally returned to one of the gems of my childhood. I played the Apple II version instead of an old DOS version like what I grew up with, but it doesn't matter. There's literally no difference between the various versions. Only reason the Apple II version was chosen was because it was the first version I ran across for which I had a working emulator. Immediately, my first question was whether or not this was the game I believed it to be. After all, my memories of Myst were fallacious, so there's a good chance my recollections of Zork were highly erroneous as well.
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.
Holy shit! It's exactly as as remember. Exactly as I remember! After twenty-five years and having nothing more than gray snippets of recollection, everything I ever experience in this fantastical world suddenly came racing back clear as day. And there I go again getting lost in the same goddamn forest without a clue. Same white house, same mailbox, same goddamn confusing forest, and same fucking sense of hopelessness in a confounded world of text. Except... Except something different happened - something monumental, something...important. I opened the window. It should be noted that despite the passing of twenty-five years, I've gained zero knowledge as far as Zork goes. I have, however, gained meager knowledge in the realms of text adventures thanks to an old MUD I frequented back in the day call Medievia. As a result, I had at least upped my simple, accepted verb-noun nomenclature typical to text adventures, except that too was a long time ago. I think the only text based adventure I've played in the last fifteen years is Reign of Grelok, the mini game based around Grognak in Fallout 3. I wish I was joking, considering Reign of Grelok is to text adventures as TWERPS is to pen and paper RPGs, but I'm not. That's a sad state of affairs as far as I'm concerned, but then text adventures don't exactly beckon when you have nearly four decades worth of games utilizing a little thing called graphics to paint the scene. That's right, video games have completely ruined our imaginations. Why would I want to draw my own map when I can have a radar in the corner of my screen. Be serious, Infocom.
One of the toughest obstacles to get around when it comes to Zork is definitely the map, or lack of. As I said, I recall drawing rudimentary flow chart style maps as a kid. Did it help? Who knows? Considering I eventually quit after running in circles throughout the forest, I suppose not. Once I made it into the true underground this time around, it was inevitable that progress was unlikely without a map. Good old fashion paper and pencil sketches to the rescue. Sheesh. I think the last time I did that was when I tried to track the exit destinations in Kid Chameleon back in the late 90s. After mapping the overworld and making an absurdly slapdash build of the underworld, I decided to check my cartographic skills against some of the finer made maps found on the internet. I realized two things. First, despite the disheveled look: lines crisscrossing to and fro, lines having to wrap the edges of the paper, and creating what appeared to be extra rooms but were just duplicated areas due to space issues or certain rooms preventing other rooms from lining up correctly, my homemade map of the underworld was correct. And secondly, the maze was a bitch to map out without a helping hand thanks to returning passages and other such nonsense. Surprisingly, I did a fairly decent job, but some rooms failed to account for the incredible amount of backtracking that was actually taking place. Thankfully, the coal mine was far more linear in layout.
The next biggest obstacle that slowed me down was knowing the list of commands. While Medievia may have improved my text adventure vocabulary, that was long ago. However, with added commands such as turn on/off, attack, kill, drop, tie, move, inventory, and possibly a few others, I could make actual headway into The Great Underground Empire. Some I picked up from deduction: rope, railing, and a 50 foot drop? Obviously, I'm being nudged in the direction to scale down the wall. Tie rope. Tie rope to what? Fughjekh!!! Tie rope to railing (you stupid, patronizing piece of machinery). Huzzah! I figured out a trivial puzzle. Now, if only I can figure out how to turn the fucking bolt on the dam, you worthless, piece of shit wrench!
Between the dam and the cyclops, it was time to expand my vocabulary because my limited knowledge is seriously holding me back. To the internet to find a pdf of the original manual. Thank god for the internet and viewable pdfs. Not only did I instantly bolster my rather lackluster vocabulary (Seriously? Wave is an accepted command? Okay...?), but after reading through the back story behind Zork and a good portion of the manual, I learned what the object of the game was. Up until that point, I was pretty much flying by the seat of my pants. I figured the point was to get through this twisted labyrinth of an underworld and maybe battle some great monster. Never on my life would I have suspected the point of the game is to collect a bevy of treasures and fill some trophy case in a decrepit old house. I suppose I should have inferred that from the presence of the case to begin with, but considering after 25 years of trophy cases typically being auto-filled by the game as a sense of accomplishment, I never suspected it was focal in my quest to apparently liberate great wealth.
I think the main reason this knocked my socks off, so to say, is because I'm used to the paradigm of the selfless adventurer, at least in my own personal experiences from early adventuring games. Rescuing princesses, saving kingdoms, or generally questing to achieve something for the "greater good" has become so ingrained that the idea of a selfish hero (would hero even be an applicable term in this instance?) is so foreign to me. I'm really just another thief along for the ride. That's not a bad thing by any means, and personally it parallels my preferred morality when it comes to role playing, but it just completely caught me off guard.
After finding out Zork's primary objective, I decided to restart the game since up until that point I had been haphazardly taking and dropping items all over The Great Underground Empire. I accepted everything as tools to be used in a variety of puzzles; not trophies to show off to...nobody. Oh, it's really all just another puzzle - the penultimate puzzle if you will. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Turns out I had to revisit my trusty old friend, Mr. Internet for two more things: defeating the cyclops and traversing the gate to the Land of the Dead.
The cyclops flat out stumped me, but it turns out if I gave my initial theories about 30 more seconds of thought, I would have figured it out on my own. I forgot to open the fucking bottle. Oh my god, I felt so stupid. Interestingly enough, the internet didn't exactly brief me on the solution since the only solution I came across was an entirely different solution that turned out to be the sort of puzzle a madman would concoct. Made sense once I put it all together, but who's going to glean the magic word from an obscure acrostic? I guess Lewis Carroll and his 1001 acrostics taught me nothing. However, after briefly seeing food mentioned in passing, I realized my faux pas with the bottle.
The Land of the Dead is a different matter altogether. Unless there's a script or piece of writing I overlooked somewhere along the line, I don't know how anyone would figure out all the required steps to repel the spirits. Oh, look! I can finally make use of wave for the one and only time. I'm glad we made proper use of that command.
After The Land of the Dead, though, the game was smooth sailing. It rather surprised me how easy the puzzles became thereafter, unless I finally picked up on the level of deduction required to defeat each puzzle. No. I think the puzzles just befell a more straightforward solution from there on out. At least nothing remotely rivaled the lunacy behind the exorcism of the spirits. Even the dam's bolt turned out to not be as frustrating as I was making it out to be.
Pick up the last few treasures, receive the final note giving me one last puzzle, and I'm off, bounding my way down some forgotten barrow towards the magic of Zork II, or so the game suggests. Not right now, but soon. And to quickly wrap up the final puzzle, I stared at my homemade map for a good ten or fifteen minutes scratching my head, saying to myself, "Huh? There's already three paths...or is there? Wait. No. Um...wait. What?" I still don't get it. Reminds me of the compass puzzle in Myst; I figured it out, but I don't know how I figured it out.
Zork enthralled me now just as it did when I was a kid and I'd gladly trudge forth through any additional wonders of The Great Underground Empire. I find text adventures to be a joy since they force the use of imagination like no other game can. By being a clever word sleuth, you have nothing more than your wits and perhaps a pen and piece of paper to help you, and that's fascinating. Text adventures are a dead form in today's world of gaming. To be fair, dead's not entirely accurate, but I have to imagine the market for them is nearly non-existent. Visual novels may be the most comparable format going today on the mainstream market, or heck, even the indie market, but even they're worlds apart. Nothing apart from a cold, lifeless screen filled with innocuous text and a static prompt can ever instill the same magic as that of a text adventure. It's similar to Pong where the absurdly primitive quality gives us a glimpse into an entirely different era where we not only get a chance to appreciate the forerunners of modern video games, but we get to experience a completely different mindset when it comes to presentation, theory, and simply, why we game. While it may be the birth of the visual novel, it's so much more as it forces the end user to create the world within his mind or on a piece of paper as a crudely drawn map. As Tom Hanks' Josh Baskin describes in Big when he plays off the idea of a graphical text adventure to create his electronic comic book proposal, "You see it won't be like these where you just follow the story along. You would actually make a whole different story appear... And when you get down to the bottom you have to make a choice of what the character's going to do..." And as long as your choice of words can be parsed, the options are fairly diverse.
Zork's not for everybody, probably not even for the vast majority, but for those who want to experience a piece of history, put their minds to work, and just have an all around enjoyable adventure, Zork is a truly fascinating game. It may have taken me 25 years, but I'm glad I finally returned to one of my fondest gaming memories of yesteryear. Now if I could only get around to River Raid, my trifecta of early, standout, game defining titles would be complete - the other being Super Mario Bros. which obviously I listed some time ago.
Nano-Rant:
Fighting the thief is absurd. I must have reloaded my save several dozen times before the RNG decided to play nice. And yet the troll went down like a sack of potatoes.
Rating: 4 Dimwits out of 5
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