Genre: AdventureDeveloper: InfocomYear: 1983
Rating: 0.00 / 10.00
(based on 0 votes)
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Setting standards for a whole genre, Infocom started a trend of excellent text adventure games that fans dubbed "interactive fiction". Speaking of the history of Zork is like speaking of the history of IF itself, as Infocom later became the most prolific of commercial interactive-fiction developers.
At first glance, people who never played a text adventure, even those that are used to classic gaming, might feel lost at the extremely simple interface. There's a description of your location in the middle of the screen, and a command prompt at the bottom. There you'll type any command you feel it's suitable, pretty much like Sierra early adventures, except here there's no graphics. The program answers to your actions in text form. So making an interactive-fiction fun is generally a work of extreme patience, for the game designer and for the player.
The point is that the Infocom titles from back then were incredibly detailed and diverse. Using only text, they managed to bring atmospheric and colorful places and characters to life. That is Zork's legacy, making space for even better and more atmospheric text games years later.
The three games in the series work alike. The plot is rather vague and pointless, particularly in Zork I. They are typical fantasy games with medieval references, where you're an "adventurer" in search for riches. Just where you come from and what kind of adventure and riches you seek is hard to figure out. The places through which you'll travel, however, are so brightly detailed they can imprint images on your mind for days, weeks.
The atmosphere feels strange sometimes, because the game is completely silent, and you'll hardly ever find other characters, so places might feel colder than the designers tried to present -- but then again maybe Zork was purposedly made this way. Other Infocom titles have the same feeling.
The parser that reads your commands is very smart, which is one of the reasons why people are not so easily scared away from Zork, even being a text adventure. Most early Sierra graphic adventures sometimes don't have the same level of interaction and freedom you find in Zork games. The commands are diverse and the parser accepts long lines of words, even more than one command per line, against two-word commands you find in most other games that feature such a parser. Once you understand the general structure of commands here, you'll see it's made to be easy to figure out and make it possible to talk to people, attach different items into one, present more than one way out of a puzzle, etc. To date, Infocom parser is still to be rivalled.
A fair word of warning I never forgot, from user rs2000 at Mobygames: "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 certain room and type [jump off the cliff], and I've never looked back since." That makes more sense than you know, and concludes my review.
