Zork: The Great Underground Empire

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.