Zork I — The Great Underground Empire (1980)

#GameEveryYear

You’re in math class, your teacher is busy with other things, so you boot up Drug Wars to pass the last ten minutes before the bell rings.

(For some of you, this memory might dredge up enough nostalgia to drown a sea lion. Others can use their imaginations.)

This isn’t something you’d ever play given a choice to do anything else (aside from calculus). It’s not a game; not really. There’s no goal other than a high score. There’s certainly no narrative, and the fun extracted is mostly the occasional thrill of a “high roll” — beating the randomly generated events, assuming you haven’t looked up the mechanics to know exactly how it works.

Thankfully, I don’t actually want to talk about Drug Wars today (though a deep dive on TI-86 games would be fascinating). Instead, as you might have guessed, I bring this up as a metaphor for this month’s #GameEveryYear: Zork.

Zork is a name you might have heard before, but a series that many modern players likely haven’t tried. The original Zork games are parser-based text adventures (which transitioned to famously cheesy FMVs years later) of the classically arcane variety; expect “look in sack” to be met with a reply of “the sack is closed,” requiring the player to input “open sack” before examining the contents. Like Rogue and many other computer games of the time, the development and release history of the original Zork is somewhat complicated. Suffice to say, though Zork was an iteration on the earlier mainframe games, Colossal Cave and Adventure, its official commercial release came in 1980 on the Tandy TRS-80 microcomputer, with the more well-known Apple II port arriving the next year.

Let’s not undersell it: Zork was both monumentally successful and extraordinarily influential. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies — a number which is frankly absurd for the early 80’s PC market — and inspired an entire genre of games that persist even to this day.

Unfortunately, that’s not a good thing.

I won’t bury the lede: Zork is not a good game. As alluded to above, it’s barely a game at all. It’s something closer to interactive fiction, though even that phrase implies a narrative which simply doesn’t exist. A very brief overview of the game: you use commands such as “north,” “south,” “up” and “in” to traverse an “underground empire” (which comprises twenty or so identical passages under a rural house) collecting trinkets. Once you’ve placed all these trinkets in a trophy case, you’re done. Oh, and there are a couple creatures to fight, which you do by executing the command “fight monster with sword.”

Let’s start with the high points, though. Even with the game’s resemblance to the classic Flash parody “Don’t Shit Your Pants,” where nearly every command (“pull down pants”) resulted in failure (“you haven’t unbuttoned them!”), the parser is impressive even today. There’s just something magical about a computer responding to natural language input, even if Zork is little more than a very, very primitive code compiler. If you really set the mood, as I attempted to, with some appropriately dungeonesque music, a big dark screen with a flickering cursor, you can get into the zone and see what early players did: a computerized, automated version of one of the tabletop dungeon-crawling adventurers they enjoyed with their friends! Unfortunately, the mechanics of the actual experience get in the way pretty quickly.

A bit, here, about how I played through Zork (my first time with the original, though I’ve played a bit of the later FMV entries). Even though the original game came with maps (at least, in some printings; as with all game history this old, it’s hard to definitively say at what point these were introduced), I played a few casual runs on an flickery Apple 2 emulator, load times and all, with no maps, no guide, no inclination about what I should even be doing. Owing to my familiarity with adventure games, I made a decent amount of progress; braved some labyrinths, killed some monsters, collected some treasures. And then I died. And that was that. At no point did I feel enjoyment in exploration akin to something like Breath of the Wild or Skyrim. To be sure, that’s not a fair comparison; the latter had 50 years of history and context to iterate on. But I do want to make it clear that the excitement of wondering what might be around the corner was just never a factor here, because the answer is inevitably “another nondescript passage.”

(I want to insert an aside — the number of self-looping areas that create nearly impossible-to-map labyrinths in the game is inexcusable. Truly abysmal game design).

I tried again with maps (and a higher performance modern port) in hand and did significantly “better,” though I gleaned no more real enjoyment from the experience. Finally, I perused some in-depth guides (Jimmy Maher’s excellent series of posts, Exploring Zork, is highly recommended — he’s much less critical of the game than I am) and speedruns just to see what the experts have gotten out of it. And … it’s more or less the same as I described above. Solve a few obvious puzzles, solve a few inane ones likely meant to sell help guides or hotline minutes, collect trophies, fin

At this point you might be wondering if I’m being too harsh on a nearly half-century old game, and sure, I recognize that early machines were barely powerful enough to multiply numbers; it’s not fair to expect a mind-blowing immersive experience. But, as Nic identified in his review of Rogue from the same year, these games weren’t hardware limited in the types of narratives they could present. And in choosing not to present a narrative at all, Zork fails in its most basic premise.

There’s no story here. No characters, no plot, no real worldbuilding. I’m totally fine with subtle, Dark Souls-style storytelling, but we don’t even get that. We get a few generic fantasy monsters (hell, the cyclops is apparently the actual individual Cyclops from The Odyssey), a thief who shows up to gutpunch you at arbitrary intervals, and some literal signposts advertising subsequent games. The only memetic morsels are the grue (grues? gruii? no one’s quite sure), the nondescript beasts waiting to eat any players who wander too far away from the dev intended path. Even that, though, is mostly an in-joke, something for nerds like me to use as Geek ID. There’s no way to describe the “story” of Zork, because it doesn’t exist. Its fantasy Drug Wars.

Would I recommend you play Zork? No. If you really want to see what the series to offer, I might suggest the wonderfully cheesy Return to Zork. If you’re in the mood for a good early text adventure, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was clearly inspired by Zork, but has the advantage of being, you know, funny. You’re not likely to be entertained playing Zork today. You’re far likelier to be eaten by a grue.

-Matt Borgard