Description
Zork: The Great Underground Empire is a classic text adventure game. You begin as an "adventurer" standing near a white house in a nice forest, but soon you set foot in the Great Underground Empire, where most of the game takes place. Your quest is to collect the Nineteen Treasures of Zork.
As in every text adventure, Zork does not use graphics. It communicates with the player via text, and the player interacts with the game by typing commands, such as "examine mailbox" or "take torch". For movement, the player types in geographical directions (such as "north" or "east" - or just "n" and "e"), and he can check what items he's carrying with the "inventory" command (or just "i").
Zork was ported over from mainframes in the late 1970s. It is one of the first "text adventures" (although the proper term for such by die-hard fans is
Interactive Fiction) and is widely considered to be one of the great classics of the genre which reached the peak of its popularity in the 80's.
Alternate Titles
- "Zork I: The Great Underground Empire" -- Re-release title
- "Zork I" -- Renamed title (after second and third Zork games were released)
- "Zork" -- Personal Software published name
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Trivia
The Zork series inspired a fantasy novel that bore the Infocom logo. It was called
The Zork Chronicles, and was written by Georg Alec Effinger, a past winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The book was published by Avon books in July, 1990.
From the back cover:
ZORK LIVESFrom the dawn of the age of computer games, one of the greatest challenges has always been Zork. This is the classic, the standard against which all adventure games are measured. Through five best-selling games, the world of Zork has been the source of fantastic quests by intrepid computer heroes.
Now at last, readers can enter the world of Zork without a computer, but with a hero at their side. Mirakles is a hero who can face the challenge of Zork with nothing more than his sword and his faithful companion Glorian.
With Glorian prodding him ever onward, Mirakles descends into the Great Underground Empire, where he encounters Spike the Protector, the Dragon's lair, the Wizard's Workroom, the winged vampire were-unicorn, and of course, the Warm Boot of Frobozz.
A major new adventure—THE ZORK CHRONICLES
"...you people are cheating yourselves if you don't
forgo food and rent to pick up Effinger's work."
—Harlan Ellison
"Wry and black and savage...
there's a knife behind every smile."
—George R.R. Martin
Infocom Inc., is the foremost publisher of interactive fiction software. Since its first release, the best-selling multiple volume ZORK games have sold over a million copies.
