Return to Zork

aka: Return to Zork: An Epic Adventure in the Great Underground Empire, Return to Zork: Ein episches Abenteuer im großen Reich der Unterwell, Return to Zork: Une aventure héroïque dans le Grand Empire Souterrain
Moby ID: 1219
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

You are standing behind the white house. There is something in the mailbox. A video message from a wizard informing you that you are the sweepstakes winner to the Valley of the Sparrows... right now, by magic flight. Upon arriving at this mysterious place however, not everything is as it should be. There's nobody to meet you and those who you do come across don't seem to have any knowledge about a sweepstakes. It looks like this is a private vacation and you'll need to find your own way through this land.

Return to Zork is a first-person adventure game using live actors and video sequences. The game is similar to Myst in interface; the player is also able to rotate the viewpoint to discover new areas and uncover items that can be used or picked up. Various characters will be met along the way and spoken to via a system of dialog choices. The game allows the player to experiment with items in various ways, including discharging them; however, this often leads to "dead ends", rendering it impossible to complete the game.

Spellings

  • リターン・トゥ・ゾーク - Japanese spelling
  • 决战大魔域 - Traditional Chinese spelling
  • 죠크행성 - Korean spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

99 People (90 developers, 9 thanks) · View all

Design
Art Direction
Technical Direction
Screenplay
Music
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Artists
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 74% (based on 21 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.2 out of 5 (based on 92 ratings with 6 reviews)

Zork -- Now with Pictures!

The Good
The first thing I remember about this game is the music. How fantastic are live recordings as background music? I only wish more games had decided to jump aboard this great development.



The Bad
Adventure games can sometimes be plagued by the 'used item' problem -- that is, if you use an item incorrectly, you're stuck. There is nothing more frustrating than realizing you need to restart a game because 2 hours ago, while trying to figure out a problem, you misused part of your inventory. Zork, unfortunately, exhibits this problem on numerous occasions.

Also, the game has 3 distinct maze areas which do nothing put aggravate the player in an attempt to make a longer game.

The Bottom Line
Quite a masterful working of the original Zork world with... well.. graphics. Some players may be upset to see another's vision of what only existed in their heads for so long.

DOS · by Game22 (35) · 2004

The Encyclopedia Frobozzica manual is more entertaining than the game.

The Good
I had high hopes for this game when I bought it. Finally, after years since I had first played it on my ATARI 800XL, someone had come to remake Zork. I was excited.

The Introduction video blew me away... it references the original game nicely and features a great fly-by over terrain. And I'd have to say that some of the characters are quite memorable and humorous, every one of them a bit odd. The puzzles are challenging (though not always logical) and there's lots of different places to explore.

And the Encyclopedia Frobozzica that comes with the game contains everything you ever wanted to know about Zork and plenty you didn't. It also references various other Infocom games, such as Wishbringer.

The Bad
First of all, it just doesn't feel like Zork. For some reason, many of the goofy characters just don't seem like the madmen of the Underground Empire. Instead they seem like.. very confused individuals who have wandered into the game by accident. Maybe it's just me, but the dialog with a lot of the characters just seemed unrewarding and left me wondering why they didn't provide useful information. Sure sure, this adds challenge to the game, but it also added to the next point I'm about to make:

The world feels uncomfortably empty. There's a reason for this. The great Underground Empire has fallen, and there's not much living above it. But there just seems to be an absence of life overall in the world. The characters you do meet are few and far between... perhaps that's one of the reasons I was expecting them to be helpful. And Return to Zork's not that large a game, so there should be enough characters with what we have here to populate it... but it's always felt cold to me... with many ways to die. My god it was easy to die! Of course come to think of it, it was easy to die in the original Zork's anyway. And many of Infocom's other adventures. Still, I never liked it back then either...

It also felt that for the amount of information included in the Encyclopedia Frobozzica (which it turns out wasn't written by Activision), there would have been a lot more substance to Return to Zork. Instead, only a couple of tiny things are ever seen, and even the video display of Flood Control Dam #3 felt anticlimatic somehow. (I also remember complaining about the quality of the video... and remember, this was a new game at the time!)



The Bottom Line
I haven't experienced any of the other Zork games since this one, and the main reason is probably because I left here with a bad taste in my mouth. In the end.... I just got a whole lot more fun reading the Encyclopedia included with the game and felt that it alone promised more than the game portion actually delivered.

I should point out that when I bought Return to Zork, I hadn't experienced Myst (still haven't actually) or any other first-person game.... or at least any other cdrom/video first person game. This was breaking ground for me, and in the end... I just never quite got into it. Since then I've only played a couple more, including Sierra's Rama and it felt a lot more vibrant and rich than Return to Zork did.

DOS · by Shoddyan (15001) · 2005

An adequate adventure, but not very Zorkish.

The Good
There's a lot to like about Return to Zork. It has good graphics (for the time) and a pretty solid design that for the most part eliminates actions that render the game unsolvable, while still maintaining a feel of complexity. In this way it combines the best of both the worlds of graphical and text-based adventuring. It's large, with a wide variety of places to travel too, and sort of a slapdash feel to the whole thing (which is a compliment considering the original text games were put together in much the same way). A few of the puzzles have multiple solutions, and there are plenty of "fun things to try", very much in the spirit of Infocom.

The interface for RTZ is particularly good, with different icons offering different, specific ways to employ an item rather than just "click this on that". For example, you can use your knife by cutting with it, throwing it at something, or even digging. And the ability to take photos and recordings of people and places, and then ask the other characters about them, was brilliant.

And, of course, the best thing about this game: A.J. Langer is in it! (Yes, I'm a fan.)

The Bad
While RTZ is a decent adventure, it's not all that Zorkish. Most of the names and places were newly invented, and only Flood Control Dam #3 stands out as being distinctively from the original Zork universe. It's almost like the designers took an existing adventure game and just stuck some Zork stuff onto it for brand-name familiarity.

There were a couple of pure (i.e. non-plot related, 7th Guest-ish) puzzles, one really horrible puzzle at the very end requiring you to collect EVERY item in the game and throw them over a bridge, and quite a few things that didn't make a whole lot of sense because of poor clues or muddled design. For instance: You learn that carrots are good for your eyes. But eating the carrots yourself doesn't work, you have to feed the carrots to the cow and then milk the cow and drink the milk... huh?! And while there aren't many, a few design problems make it possible to get permanently stuck.

The voice acting is about par for the time, which is to say, not very good... Jason Hervey gave a horrid performance as the cowardly troll, and the singing tree was hideous. Trembyle the wizard and the lighthouse keeper are amusing, though, and Morpheus has a great evil laugh. Most of the characters just reinforce the non-Zorkish feel: It's hard to feel like you're in a different world when you run into people with English, Canadian, and Scottish accents.

The Bottom Line
It took Activision three tries to really get the feel of the Zork universe across graphically. Grand Inquisitor got it right. Nemesis was too dark and humorless. RTZ is middle-of-the-road, lighthearted enough to make the atmosphere work, but fundamentally different enough to detract from it.

DOS · by Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe (1674) · 2001

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Return to Zork appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Bugs

The endgame has one of the most frustrating bugs ever in the history of adventure gaming. In order to reach the final confrontation with the main villain, you have to throw every single item in the game that isn't nailed down into a pit to raise a bridge. The problem is, due to various bugs, you'll sometimes end up not raising the bridge even after throwing everything into the pit, making it impossible to progress to the ending and resulting in you having to restart the game from the very beginning.

Because this game was made before the WorldWide Web allowed for the widespread distribution of patches to correct post-production bugs, this error was never addressed and anyone playing the game will just have to hope they're lucky and don't run into it.

Cut Content

The singing tree mentions some "friends" who have brought you to her. This is a reference to the Mushroom People, who were in the game's original screenplay and design but ultimately cut out of the final version. The tree's reference to them was accidentally left in.

Development

The creators of Return to Zork weren't familiar with the rest of the series, never having actually played any of the original text games.

Encyclopedia Frobozicca

Nino Ruffini, compiler of the Encyclopedia Frobozzica, merged the encyclopedia entries from Sorcerer and Zork Zero with text from some of the other Infocom games' box contents and a few of his own entries. The original version of the Encyclopedia was circulated around Delphi and the rest of the Internet until Activision came across it and asked Ruffini for permission to use it in RTZ so they wouldn't have to recompile everything themselves.

Floppy Version

The floppy version of this game came on an incredible 12 floppies! In order to play the game, you had to spend a fair amount of time installing it first by floppy swapping. It proved to be one more reason to get a CD-Rom drive for your computer.

Macintosh Version

In the Macintosh version of Return To Zork, many things that were not required for completing the game were eliminated. For example, in the original DOS version, showing the matches to the Lighthouse Keeper would trigger a response "Thank you, I never smoke cough". In the Macintosh version however, he simply has nothing to say about it.

MPEG Version

A special version of the game was released with re-encoded MPEG video for both DOS and the Macintosh in 1995. It was exclusively sold as OEM version. The Macintosh version came with the Apple MPEG Media System card and the DOS version came with the ReelMagic card.

Japanese PC Version

This version is fully dubbed and all game text are translated. The disc contains installers for DOS/V, PC-98 and FM Towns.

Korean and Chinese Versions PC Version

This version is fully dubbed but NO text is translated, not even in the menus. Chinese dialogue was recorded in Taiwan. This version was sold in both Taiwan and Mainland China (and possibly Hong Kong).

Planetfall Trailer

Return to Zork came with a trailer for Planetfall. Infocom/Activision was developing a graphic update of the the verenable favorite. Unfortunately, the game never saw the light of day.

References

The game's intro video begins with the text on a black screen "You are standing behind the white house. In one corner is a small window which is slightly ajar.". This text is copied from the first thing shown on the screen of the first Zork game. The video then shows you the house and rotates around it before finding the sweepstakes invitation in the mailbox (which is not what happens in the first Zork game).

Information also provided by Alan Chan, molokaicreeper, Scott Monster, Techademus, Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe and WildKard

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Related Sites +

  • Design documents
    Resources collected for The Zork Compendium. Includes design documents, letters, storyboards, scripts, maps and sketches used during the development of the game.
  • Game Nostalgia
    Provides extensive background info for Return to Zork, pictures of the cast and examples of voice-overs, full credits with shots and info about the design team, a demo of the game, specific details about the game, various goodies, all musical themes, shots of every location in the game, saved games, a list of reviews, including a "nostalgic "review and tech specs.
  • Museum of Computer Adventure Game History
    Contains scans of the manual and official BradyGames guide by Peter Spear.
  • Playing Return to Zork Windows XP
    Instructions by Inferno will tell you how
  • ScummVM
    supports Return to Zork under Windows, Linux, Macintosh and other platforms.
  • The Infocom Bugs List
    Consolidated list of bugs by Graeme Cree, originally appearing in XYZZY newsletters.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 1219
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

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Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Derrick 'Knight' Steele.

PC-FX, SEGA Saturn added by Corn Popper. Windows added by Dragom. PlayStation added by Kabushi. PC-98, FM Towns added by Terok Nor. Macintosh added by Cyborg.

Additional contributors: Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe, Jeanne, Shoddyan, martin jurgens, ケヴィン, Macs Black, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack, trembyle, Colette Lambert.

Game added March 28, 2000. Last modified March 1, 2024.