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Game Informer Magazine (Issue #138, Oct. 2004) named it one of the "Top 25 Most Influential Games of All Time".
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The Zork universe has been adapted to a book series.
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Zork was Infocom's first game.
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The currency in Zork, the zorkmid, is also used in NetHack.
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Fans remade Zork I as a 3D game using the Neverwinter Nights game engine. It's available here.
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A Japanese version was released for the Sega Saturn and PlayStation in 1996. This Japanese version includes graphics, sound effects, music, and auto-mapping. It was only released in Japan.
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There is also an abridged version, called Mini-Zork I, dated November 24, 1987. Mini-Zork was released free of charge as a promotion.
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Zork I introduced the famous grue, a "sinister, lurking presence" who kills adventurers who go exploring in the dark. Grues appeared (or, at least, were mentioned) in many subsequent Infocom adventures, right up to the 1997 graphic adventure Zork Grand Inquisitor, published by Activision.
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It is possible to score all 350 points in 231 moves (and complete the game completely in 236 moves).
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Infocom did not begin their tradition of including feelies, or extra items related to a game, until the 1982 release Deadline. Later re-releases of the game, however, were packaged with:

* The booklet The Great Underground Empire: A History, by "Froboz Mumbar"
* A map roughly corresponding to a portion of the game's area

Although the back of the Zork I "Grey box" depicted a zorkmid coin included with the other feelies, production difficulties led to the coins' omission from the packages. Zorkmid coins were not included as feelies until the release of the Zork Trilogy boxed set.
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While the authors of Dungeon (as Zork was then known) were at MIT, a programmer from Digital Equipment Corporation translated part of Dungeon from MDL to Fortran and crammed it into a 56KB PDP-11. (Dungeon was at the time playable on PDP-10's but not on smaller systems.) The game's authors were surprised that such a small system could run the game and provided sources for a more complete translation. When Dungeon became the commercial product Zork, Infocom agreed that if an Infocom copyright notice was put on the Fortran version, noncommercial distribution would be allowed. This Fortran version, and C translations thereof, have been included in several Linux distributions.
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In the Zork games, the player is not limited to verb-noun commands, such as "take lamp", "open mailbox", and so forth. Instead, the parser supports more sophisticated sentences such as "put the lamp and sword in the case", "look under the rug", and "drop all except lantern".
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Activision briefly offered free downloads of Zork I as part of the promotion of Zork: Nemesis, and Zork II and Zork III as part of the promotion for Zork Grand Inquisitor, as well as a new adventure: Zork: The Undiscovered Underground. This led many to believe that the games had been released as freeware, even though the included license explicitly prohibited redistribution. Activision's legal department has recently stated that the promotion relating to those games has ended and that it is not legal to distribute the games or make them available for download.
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Infocom adapted the PDP-10 Zork into Zork I-III for most popular small computers of the era, including the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the Atari 8-bit family, the TRS-80, CP/M systems and the IBM PC.

Part of the reason for splitting Zork into three different games was that, unlike the PDP systems the original ran on, micros did not have enough memory and disk storage to handle the entirety of the original game. In the process, more content was added to Zork to make each game stand on its own.
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Joel Berez and Marc Blank developed a specialized virtual machine to run Zork I, called the Z-machine. The first "Z-machine Interpreter Program", ZIP, for a small computer was written by Scott Cutler for the TRS-80. The trilogy was written in ZIL, which stands for "Zork Implementation Language", a language similar to LISP.
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The first version of Zork was written in 1977–1979 on a DEC PDP-10 computer by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, and implemented in the MDL programming language. All four were members of the MIT Dynamic Modeling Group.
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"Zork" was originally MIT hacker jargon for an unfinished program. The developers named the completed game Dungeon, but by that time the name Zork had already stuck.
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Zork was named #13 overall among the “150 Best Games of All Time” by Computer Gaming World Magazine (15th Anniversary Issue--November 1996).
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This paragon of text adventuring has been thoroughly parodied in the anonymous 1988 game Pork 1: The Great Underground Sewer System.
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Infocom started to translate this game into German, but found it rather difficult to re-program the parser. Therefore, only a German beta version exists.
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One bedroom programmer actually ported the game to the Game Boy of all things, using the basic code of the Sinclair Spectrum version, as both systems were powered the Z80 processor. Inputting words involved cycling the cursor through one letter at a time, similarly to inputting initial for high scores on a joystick. Surely the ultimate case of "right game, wrong format".
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If you play Zork in a dark place, you'll be likely to be eaten by a grue.
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The first commercial release of Zork I (for the TRS-80, distributed by Personal Software) was simply called Zork. The game disk was packaged in a plastic bag with a large manual showing an adventurer outfitted in barbarian guard attacking the troll, with the white house in the background. Such early versions are quite difficult to come by and are highly prized by collectors.
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In the December 2001 Issue of PC Gamer, Zork I, II, and II were shipped on the CD included with the magazine.
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Zork was voted #70 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll published by Game Informer Magazine (Issue 100, August 2001).
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The trivia by Droog is missing a detail: The actual number of leaves in the pile is 69,105. It's an hex/octal inside joke for programmers.
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In the 200th aniversary issue of Computer Gaming World, the readers named it the ninth best game of all time.
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As part of the release of Zork Nemesis, Activision released Zork I as freeware on their website. (At present, the links to download the game at activision.com are dead, but the game is available at numerous fan sites.)
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This game is a member of Computer Gaming World's Hall of Fame.
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Typing in "xyzzy" and "plugh" (magic words from an earlier text adventure game), the game comes back with: "A hollow voice says 'Fool.' "
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You can find out how many leaves are in the pile of leaves covering the grate in the clearing by typing "count leaves". Strangely enough, it only takes 1 turn to count all the leaves.
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"Hello, Sailor!"

This well-recognized Infocom phrase got its start here. Type it in, and you'll get the response "Nothing happens here."

Type it in almost any room in any Infocom game, and you'll get the same response. This may be one of the oldest Infocom red herrings around.
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There is a location in the game called "Aragain Falls."

Spell ARAGAIN backwards, and you'll see something more familiar.
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(From The New Zork Times Vol.3 No.2 Spring 1984)

Some statistics about Zork 1:

• Number of rooms: 110
• Number of different ways to die: 28
• Number of words in vocabulary: 698
• Number of takeable objects: 59 (The raft is actually three different takeable objects: inflated, uninflated, and punctured)

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