Zork

I assume being eaten by a Grue is bad.

Let’s get this out of the way. I’m terrible at puzzles. Terrible.

OK, I’m actually not that bad at them, I’ve seen so many puzzles that often I don’t have to solve the puzzle so much as remember that I know how to solve it, because I didn’t solve it last time and I looked up the answer and I can remember the answer (or at least the technique used to do it). This is actually what a lot of higher level mathematics and engineering is — a toolbox of tricks that let you solve a puzzle, and if you get enough tricks and keep trying your old tricks you may solve a new puzzle.

It might be more accurate to say that I have no ‘puzzle stamina’, or ‘puzzle willpower.’ If I see a puzzle and do not instantly know what the technique is, I will often do the puzzle equivalent of “flip over the table,” declare the puzzle stupid, and anyone who can solve it stupid, and then secretly look up the answer so that I know for the next puzzle.

Which is all to say that while I’ve played Zork, I never got past the first puzzle.

Zork (Infocom version). Image by Wikipedia.

Zork was one of the first text adventure games (sometimes called Interactive Fiction¹), developed by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling (who went on to found Infocom). The game didn’t use joysticks or have a bevy of keyboard mappings you needed; you could type in (a very limited) English. Like the old paragraph games, the game could describe your settings via natural language and you could tell the computer what to do “Go north” or “Pick up the lamp” and the game could respond with “You go North, you see a …” or “You pick up the lamp” or … it could throw a curveball. “The lamp is way too hot to touch, and you don’t want to burn yourself.”

And then you’d have to figure out how you were going to pick up the lamp.

Unlike Sudoko or Crosswords or any puzzle, the puzzles in Text Adventures could be anything the designers could think of. The computer handled “game state”², and had to be able to parse the commands, but any puzzle you could think of could be in it. Zork’s parser was also well ahead of the prior state of the art (such as Colossal Cave Adventure) which limited players to one or two words. It couldn’t be as open a world as a Role Playing Game, but it could be anything that someone could imagine … after the programmers implemented the logic.

Zork didn’t create text adventures, but expanded the audience greatly. What had started off as a game played on MIT mainframes soon made its way (via Infocom) to Apple computers and personal computers.

Zork cleverly worked around one of the biggest problems in early computer games … terrible graphics, because it didn’t need any. Later Infocom games would add simple graphics or maps, but that wasn’t always an improvement. Much like Jaws worked around the terrible robo-shark by not showing it, Zork did well by only saying “It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue,” and letting your imagination fill in the horrible, horrible gaps.

I was eaten by a grue. Repeatedly. I never got past the grue.

Despite this, I would play other Infocom titles (typically borrowing them) but I don’t think I ever came anywhere close to getting past the first puzzle in any of them, not unless I had a book to tell me how to do it.

More recently, I went to the Interactive Fiction Database and played Counterfeit Monkey, a Emily Short’s (relatively) short game that gives you tools to manipulate items by toying with their letters³, and found it delightful. Maybe its just that now (with the internet) a hint or simply cheating is just a google search away and I don’t need to flip the table.

Those games in the IFDB are descendants of Zork, as are Multi-User-Dungeons. The Library of Congress calls Zork one of the 10 most important video games in history⁴ and it’s easy to see why. It’s not like many people can get past the first few levels of Pac-man, either, but we still enjoy the game. Which is why Zork seems like a shoe-in first ballot entry into “The 100 Most Influential Games of the 20th Century.”

Assuming it can get past the grue.

1. Personally, “Interactive Fiction” means “Live Action Role Playing,” but I’m not the language police.

2. Where the player is, what he has, whether the lamp is too hot to touch and the lights are on or off, etc.

3. From the game — “Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.”

4. Almost as good as being mentioned here.