Zork: The Great Underground Empire

The Good
Zork is one of the first in its genre. And it is quite enjoyable, even to this day. It has witty humour, interesting puzzles and a strange yet interesting setting to explore.

The Bad
Zork's main shortcoming is how some of the actions you perform can lead the game into a dead end. Don't leave any candles burning, for example. You might need them later and they actually do get shorter over time. Also use your batteries sparsely because they might be useful later on. Things like these can make the game rather frustrating, because you get no warning of their importance and when you lose them the game just continues. So if you save your game, there's no turning back anymore and you have to start over.

Some of the solutions for puzzles are also rather obscure, but I won't spoil anything here.

Though the game has plenty of back-story and setting, there is no real story that drives the player. No real motive, except for gathering treasure that result in a numerical score.

The Bottom Line
Zork is worth playing. There's quite some funny bits, and interesting puzzles. If not just for its historical relevance as one of the first text adventures to reach commercial success.

The Good
Great images/descriptions, a huge world to explore, a variety of puzzles ranging from simple to agonizingly difficult, a great text parser, and enough random events to make it replayable.

The Bad
The thief, who had a tendency to steal your items and move things around (even before you could find them, sometimes). Also, the main light source is limited and, unless you plan ahead, you can get yourself irrevocably stuck in the dark. But these are just minor annoyances.

The Bottom Line
Zork I was my first REAL computer game. I originally played it on an old TRS-80 Model III with 4k of RAM. Most of the puzzles were challenging enough to keep my 10-year-old brain busy for hours, and the vivid room descriptions still create detailed images in my mind to this day. This game is truly a timeless classic... it is available as a free download (Infocom officially declared it freeware) from the Unofficial Infocom Homepage (http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/).

The Good
That's what I said when I uncovered this relic from my disk box when I was eight or nine. Maybe younger. Zork? What kind of a weird name was that? It had to be a stupid action scroller, I figured. Or maybe one of those Ultima rip-off rpgs. Or maybe it was a curse-word. Back then I guess it was my surmise that in the gaming community there were only a few types of games 1) action 2) rpg 3) the sparse graphical adventure games 4) text-adventures with limited parsers. Well... I was wrong. Zork was a great game with an unparrelled (at that time) parser. There were no graphics, which put me off at first and it took me a while to discover that I didn't even need my joystick. Sadly, I set it aside and began tentatively typing orders. And, as I deciphered more and more commands, it showed me the light. The landscape surrounding the seemingly innocent white house was inhabited by few characters, most memorably the thief (with his trademark stilleto), a cyclops, and a troll. The descriptions provoked wonderful images in my mind. So I was content to wander around and push buttons rather than solve the puzzles.

The Bad
I dunno. Everyone should take a look at it once. It might not be your thing, but it's still a large chunk of gaming history.

The Bottom Line
CAUTION: Zork could spark a love for interactive fiction. I didn't even know what I was doing, but somehow I managed to find my way to a certian room and type [jump off the cliff], and I've never looked back since.

The Good
Zork: The Underground Empire shows its long gestation period on seventies mainframes. Unlike the two immediate sequels, Z:TUG is wildly eclectic and rambling, with very little overall structure. Surprisingly, this is to its advantage. From the famous opening, down into the passages, through some nastily ingenious puzzles to the final confrontation, Z:TUG retains a strange, compressed energy. Completing it is extremely satisfying, and for years being able to say "I finished Zork" was a badge of merit in gaming circles.

The Bad
The problems with Zork are really only those of text adventures as a whole. The puzzles are frustrating, it's possible to be stuck at four or five different points simultaneously, and gamers used to such extravagances as "graphics" and "sound" may find this blast from the past annoying and pointless.

The Bottom Line
Zork is both an excellent introduction to text adventuring and a piece of computer-history royalty in its own right. Despite the myriad other Infocom releases, and the release of two immediate sequels, Zork has a flavour and excitement all its own.

The Good
Very deep game, with hundreds of room to explore and days worth of play material. Engaging story line across the series. The text parser is surprisingly advanced for its age, with contextual parsing.

Another positive aspect about this particular text parser is that there are so many fun things you can do and so many extra commands that do not help to advance the story in any way but yield some very funny results. Try typing JUMP or SCREAM or ATTACK THE HOUSE; type LOOK AT ME, KISS ME, TAKE ME, and EAT ME for more laughs. If you’re the masochistic type, there are plenty of ways to kill yourself off with the various commands at your disposal.

Superb and detailed writing helps set the atmosphere and paint a vivid picture but is just vague enough to allow you to use your imagination.

Humour is abound in this game(provided you type in absurd commands) and I discover a new dialogue every time I replay it.

The Bad
Honestly, this is as close to perfection as it gets. But if you’re not fond of text parser, prefer objectives clearer than “go get some treasure,” and dislike such a great degree of freedom to explore, then maybe you won’t like the game as much. If the lack of graphics and sound, the need to draw maps (or use someone else’s, especially for navigating the mazes), the limited amount of items allowed in your inventory, the possibility of dooming yourself to failure without realizing it, and the lack of a driving story is a deal breaker for you, then maybe skip this one.

The Bottom Line
Perfect for all types of gamers. Play it blind if you want a challenge. If you're a novice, the official maps and manual are a great help, which makes the game much easier while still presenting a fun enough challenge. Include save options so you don't have to start over again an again.

I bought my copy from GOG, which comes with a DOS-Box, so no setup required.

The Good
Zork: The Great Underground Empire (also called Zork I) is a classic text adventure game from text legends Infocom. The sparse plot casts you as a nameless adventurer placed without ceremony near the entrance to a vast underground empire. Your goal: Explore and get stuff.

As simple as it is, the game pulls you in from the beginning. There is a real sense of a large world worth discovering. Getting to the next room is a goal in itself.

Probably the most famous aspect of Zork is its humor. The game is full of delightful little jokes and details. For instance, famously, when the player enters an area which is pitch dark they are warned that they could be eaten by a grue. Asking what a grue is yields hilarity.

The lack of graphics can be an asset if you allow yourself to be sucked into the game. There is a certain experience to entering the theater of your imagination and Infocom knows how to guide you there. Even if a graphical version of the game were available, it would lack that character which is apart of Zork's very nature.

The Bad
There is really only one issue I have with Zork, though it is a big one: It is possible to "break" the game and not know it.

In other words, actions which you take can make it so that you cannot win the game. And, as stated, the game will not tell you that this has happened.

The Bottom Line
Zork is a very challenging but very fun game. It is a legend among text adventures and a game which every gamer should try at least one.

The Good
The language of this text adventure is excellent and it really gets the imagination going. It's of course greatly influenced by the Colossal Cave game from the '70s made by Will Crowther, a cave explorer(spelunker). Zork 1 has detailed geographical descriptions of the caves, forests, mountains and other places you explore, which gives the game a slightly educational feel. Much like Colossal Cave, within all the realism is fantasy and mythology, and the game also has a strong sense of humour. One other notable thing is the intelligence of the parser, which will understand quite a bit of input, sadly a lot more than many other text adventure games.

The Bad
While I think the problem solving is more reasonable than in the next two Zork games, the problems are still a bit strange and it could take some people years to figure out how to complete the game. Some of the solutions were satisfying to discover, while others I thought were silly and hurt the game.

The Bottom Line
Well I suppose it's a big ask to expect people to play text adventures today, but if anyone ever wanted to take the challenge of playing a game with no graphics, this, along with Planet Fall, I'd recommend. It'd be very satisfying to see a young gamer somehow get past the natural dismissiveness and see the good in the game.

The Good
A very creative game that sucks you into its adventure without the need for any graphics. Collect treasures from the dungeon beneath the white house in the woods while dealing with the traps, denizens & puzzles of the Great Underground Empire. Beware the thief who will steal from you as well. Wasted many hours to this game at a friends house trying to suss out how to navigate the maze of twisty little passages, all alike or how to open the large egg encrusted with precious jewels. This game will make you think not just about what to do next but how & in what order it should be done.

The Bad
No graphics will be too retro for many & some of the puzzles are near impossible without a walkthrough.

The Bottom Line
The first interactive fiction game from Infocom. Completing this adventure back in the '80s was a feat of legend. Don't be eaten by a grue!

The Good
Zork 1 is a well written game with lore of a forgotten empire. You explore an underground world and "treasure hunt" historic objects while confronted by a thief who may steal all your belongings, a cyclops and a battle troll. I liked in this world it was the year 948 GUE and you could be eaten by a grue if you wandered into a dark place without your lantern. You are armed with a sword and need to use your imagination to understand where you really are each room doesn't give you much information unless you start examining everything.

The Bad
The commodore 64 release was interesting because your computer was hooked up to a floppy disc drive. The disc drive would begin to make noise if you typed in a command "Kill Thief with Nasty Knife" that actually moved you forward in the game. Most early gamers had no map to know where to go. The games creators made this adventure HARD but not impossible to succeed in winning.

The Bottom Line
Zork 1 is a text adventure game that was written from the original MIT cave adventure that was so big it had to be cut into 3 parts to be released on 5" Floppy disc at the time. In the early 1980s, every move you make in an adventure game could be your last. There were no walk through cheats and hints were hard to find (i used a hint book and played for months) so you were on your own with no guide. By exploring a small white house in the forest you find that you are sitting above a great underground empire. You then have to fill a trophy case with 19 items in order to score 350 points and win the game.

The Good
Sometime in the Seventies, the first ever text adventure was born. Known as Colossal Cave Adventure, it was the brainchild of William Crowther who developed the game in Fortran on his company's PDP-10 with “non-computer people” in mind, who could direct the game using natural language. Zork was the next game in the line of text-only adventures. It was developed by four MIT students using the same computer CCA was written on, and the team decided to take its gameplay a step further.

Zork: The Great Underground Empire was picked up by Infocom for distribution across the computer platforms of the day, but the company decided to split the adventure up into three volumes, and it is only the first volume that I played so far. The game is still text-only, but I had no problems with this as the only text-only adventure I played before was Softporn Adventure.

If you're new to text-only adventures, you are presented with a paragraph describing each scene, a list of visible exits, and any items that may be picked up. You then have to input a one- or two-word command to progress through the game. Zork I bests this by allowing more than two, in the same way that we talk to people. Having said that, I found it easy to picture the scene. For instance, the first scene has you standing in front of a white house. This reminds me of the same white house from Return to Zork. I haven't played it yet,

I am reviewing the Macintosh version of Zork, which uses a San Serif font. The text is easy on the eye, and you can change the font and its size anytime you want if it becomes boring for you. There are no sound effects in the game, except if you try to delete a character that isn't even there. Then again, there is no sound in other text adventures around its time.

For a text-only adventure game like this, it is especially important to make a map of the areas you are visiting, especially when you first enter the maze underneath the trap door. Not only will you discover shortcuts that you can use to save time, it helps you avoid dangers such as the thief and cyclops by spending too much time in the maze.

What I like about Zork is the different solutions to some of the puzzles in the game, due to the dangers that are mentioned above. There are also humorous things you can do, with my favorite one where you are trying to communicate with the thief or cyclops.

The Bad
You can only carry so much items, but how much depends on the weight of one of the already stored items. Zork's ultimate goal is to collect about twenty treasures and bring them back to the white house, and each one carries more weight than any other items you pick up. So you need to dump one or two of these treasures before collecting any other items.

And like other text adventures of its time, deaths comes much more easily, mainly as a result of you making a mistake. Having said that, I don't like the way if you indeed die in Zork, you warp to another place instead of restarting the game.

The Bottom Line
Zork is a very basic text-only adventure game where the object is to collect enough treasures and put them in the white mansion. It was released for the many computers around at the time of its release, and if you pick up the game anywhere, not only would you get the “freelies”, which was Infocom's way for preventing piracy of the games, you could run it on your current system (if you have a floppy disk drive). This is a good adventure game to get started, and if it wasn't for Crowther, Zork wouldn't even been born.

The Good
Previously, I had only played Scott Adams' Text Adventures, which were only 16K, and supported 2 words (Get Rope). I loved those, but when Zork came out, it blew me away, and raised the bar on Intereactive Fiction.

The Bad
I was a bit put off by the AMOUNT of text for each description, since I was used to the bare minimum. But I soon got used to it.

The Bottom Line
A classic that everyone should play