You Are Likely to be Eaten by a Grue

I played it first on my shiny new Apple //c, back in April 1984. (Hey! Our logo graphic is an Apple //c!) I’ve fiddled about with it in years since on various other platforms, but it was the //c upon which I actually spent some time with it. The first game I purchased for that, my first Apple, actually. Zork I from Infocom. One of the most famous works of interactive fiction (or “IF” for sceners). A detailed text adventure with graphics provided by your imagination.

Sadly, I never solved the game. I played a good bit and we traded underground maps back in middle-school, I recall. But I never got around to solving it. My personal favorite of Infocoms gems was Brian Moriarty’s Wishbringer. Great fun solving that, later, on my Amiga 1000 (I was an early Amigoid). It was one of the few games available for the Amiga at the time, ironically. (I actually, recently purchased a full, boxed version of Wishbringer – just to get the whole package, in anticipation of replaying it on a modern Z-Machine interpreter with my wife as a form of TV alternative, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet.) But that’s Wishbringer…and this article is about Zork I.

The point of this post, which I am about to draw to a close, is a certain Gamasutra article entitled “The History of Zork” which crossed my radar in the form of an item in A2Central‘s RSS feed. Give it a read. IF is one of the best protrusions of gaming.

And in related news, Jason Scott, creator of BBS: The Documentary is hard at work on Get Lamp, a text adventure documentary film which will should wrap up in August of this year. Don’t miss it.