Tag Archives: zork

We left off last time with the Alice area at the top of the well. Let’s continue now with the rooms that sprawl around the Carousel Room, which are now much easier to get to since we’ve stopped the carousel’s rotation by switching it off from the Machine Room.

In the Dreary Room off to the north is the first recorded instance of a venerable adventure-gaming cliché: a locked door with a key in the keyhole on the other side. What follows would quickly become a pretty rote procedure for seasoned adventurers, almost like a maze, but taken without all of the baggage of games to come it’s a fresh and clever puzzle.

>PUT MAT UNDER DOOR
THE PLACE MAT FITS EASILY UNDER THE
DOOR.
>PUT OPENER IN KEYHOLE
THE LID IS IN THE WAY.
>OPEN LID
THE LID IS NOW OPEN.
>PUT OPENER IN KEYHOLE
THERE IS A FAINT NOISE FROM BEHIND THE
DOOR AND A SMALL CLOUD OF DUST RISES
FROM BENEATH IT.
DONE.
>GET MAT
AS THE PLACE MAT IS MOVED, A RUSTY IRON
KEY FALLS FROM IT AND ONTO THE FLOOR.
>GET KEY
TAKEN.

This puzzle was also present in the PDP-10 Zork; thus my relative confidence in proclaiming it the first of its kind. Interestingly, in the original game the mat that was needed was the welcome mat found all the way back outside the front door to the white house. In the PC version Lebling instead placed a handy place mat in the gazebo alongside the U.S. News and Dungeon Report.

There’s also a dragon underground, the slaying of which is a tricky but not untenable puzzle. The dragon was holding a princess captive — a princess who can retrieve a key from a certain unicorn back in the garden, solving a problem that has been frustrating us since we first wandered in. The game subtly but effectively cues us that we need something from her, and that we should be following her.

>EXAMINE WOMAN
THE PRINCESS (FOR SHE IS OBVIOUSLY ONE)
SHAKES HERSELF AWAKE, THEN NOTICES YOU
FOR THE FIRST TIME. SHE SMILES. "THANK
YOU FOR RESCUING ME FROM THAT HORRID
WORM," SHE SAYS. "I MUST DEPART. MY
PARENTS WILL BE WORRIED ABOUT ME." WITH
THAT, SHE ARISES, LOOKING PURPOSEFULLY
OUT OF THE LAIR.
>OPEN CHEST
THE HINGES ARE VERY RUSTY, BUT THEY SEEM
TO BE STARTING TO GIVE. YOU CAN PROBABLY
OPEN IT IF YOU TRY AGAIN. THERE IS
SOMETHING BUMPING AROUND INSIDE. ALL
THIS RUMMAGING AROUND HAS STARTLED THE
YOUNG WOMAN.
THE PRINCESS IGNORES YOU. SHE LOOKS
ABOUT THE ROOM, BUT HER EYES FIX ON THE
SOUTH.
THE PRINCESS WALKS SOUTH. SHE GLANCES
BACK AT YOU AS SHE GOES.
>S
DRAGON ROOM
THERE IS A DISHEVELLED AND SLIGHTLY
UNKEMPT PRINCESS HERE.
THE PRINCESS WALKS EAST. SHE GLANCES
BACK AT YOU AS SHE GOES.
>E

It’s another puzzle that needs that little nudge… no, wait, this puzzle has that little nudge. If only they were all this way…

But enough with good puzzles. Let’s talk about the first of Zork II‘s two legendarily bad ones: the Bank of Zork. In his review of the game on IFDB, Peter Pears actually called this puzzle “beautiful.” In a way I can see what he means, but for me it’s undone once again by a lack of sufficient cues as well as a lack of feedback and parser difficulties. The bank consists of several rooms, but the heart of it is the Safety Depository.

SAFETY DEPOSITORY
THIS IS A LARGE RECTANGULAR ROOM. THE
EAST AND WEST WALLS HERE WERE USED FOR
STORING SAFETY DEPOSIT BOXES. AS MIGHT
BE EXPECTED, ALL HAVE BEEN CAREFULLY
REMOVED BY EVIL PERSONS. TO THE EAST,
WEST, AND SOUTH OF THE ROOM ARE LARGE
DOORWAYS. THE NORTHERN "WALL" OF THE
ROOM IS A SHIMMERING CURTAIN OF LIGHT.
IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM IS A LARGE
STONE CUBE, ABOUT 10 FEET ON A SIDE.
ENGRAVED ON THE SIDE OF THE CUBE IS SOME
LETTERING.
ON THE GROUND IS A SMALL, WORN PIECE OF
PAPER.

As you might expect, that “curtain of light” is actually another exit. However, we can’t go that way simply by typing “N.” That just leads to, “THERE IS A CURTAIN OF LIGHT THERE,” which is in turn likely to lead us to give up on that direction of inquiry. Yet it turns out we can “ENTER CURTAIN.” Similar parser problems dog us at every stage in the bank, but even they aren’t the worst of it. To make a long and convoluted puzzle short, the place where we go after entering the curtain of light is dictated by the direction we last came from before entering. This is never explained or even hinted at at any point, and it’s obviously a very subtle and tenuous connection to make. Most players who “solved” the Bank of Zork did so only through sheer persistence, moving everywhere and trying everything, and were left with no idea of what they had actually done or how the puzzle really worked. Like Zork II‘s other notorious puzzle (of which more in a moment), the Bank of Zork specifically informed an entry in Graham Nelson’s “Player’s Bill of Rights”: the player should “be able to understand a problem once it is solved.”

Next we explore the volcano area to the west, which we accomplish largely via a hot-air balloon. Many of the puzzles and situations in Zork were designed around the capabilities of the technology used to create the games. Having created the programming for vehicles once for the boat found back in Zork I, the designers continued to use it again and again. Like the well, the balloon puzzle first involves deducing what it — “A LARGE AND EXTREMELY HEAVY WICKER BASKET” with “A RECEPTACLE OF SOME KIND” in the center and “AN ENORMOUS CLOTH BAG DRAPED OVER THE SIDE” — actually is. We need to burn something, like the U.S. News and Dungeon Report, in the receptacle to inflate the bag. The idea that burning something as small as a newspaper could do the trick doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the real world, but adventure games have always had physics all their own, as Duncan Stevens and I briefly discussed in the comments section of my last post. Of more immediate concern are the parser frustrations that once again make this puzzle more difficult than it was likely designed to be.

And so we come to the Oddly-Angled Room, better known as the infamous baseball maze. At first it appears to be a conventional maze, but we soon realize that it defies all attempts to map it. Every connection is literally random, changing constantly according to no rhyme or reason. The diamond-shaped windows in the floor of each room don’t seem to offer much help. The key clue is the “club” we find:

A LONG WOODEN CLUB LIES ON THE GROUND
NEAR THE DIAMOND-SHAPED WINDOW. THE CLUB
IS CURIOUSLY BURNED AT THE THICK END.
>GET CLUB
TAKEN.
>EXAMINE CLUB
THE WORDS "BABE FLATHEAD" ARE BURNED
INTO THE WOOD.

We’re expected to “run the bases”, moving diagonally through the rooms starting from home plate, which is located at the west end of the “ballpark”: southeast, northeast, northwest, southwest. The windows give us a slight clue when we are on the right track, lighting up more strongly for each correct movement we make. Even so, this is all deeply problematic on a couple of levels. Firstly, Zork eventually spread well beyond the United States, to players who had no clue about the game of baseball, inspiring the most amusingly specific of all Nelson’s Player’s Rights: a player should “not need to be American to understand hints.” But of course, even many Americans aren’t interested in baseball at all and know next to nothing about it. This right could be better rewritten as a prohibition on requiring any sort of esoteric or domain-specific outside knowledge. Yet the puzzle is even dodgy for someone like me, who loves baseball. From what I can see, there is no way to deduce that home plate in this particular ballpark is located at its western side, and thus no way to know which way to go in running the bases, at least outside of the extremely, shall we say, subtle cues offered by the windows. The baseball maze wasn’t in the PDP-10 Zork, but was devised by Lebling specifically for the PC version. He’s repeatedly apologized for it over the years since, noting that it stemmed from his boredom with mazes and desire to do something different with the general idea. Needless to say, we’d have been better off with a standard maze.

Up to this point we’ve been amassing treasures and scoring points for collecting them, but, unlike in Zork I, we’ve found no obvious thing to do with them. In the PDP-10 version, these treasures were simply more loot to be collected in the white house’s trophy case. In this game, of course, that’s not possible, what with the barrow having sealed itself behind us and the white house consigned to Zork I. The most obvious solution to this problem would have been to just give us another trophy case somewhere. That’s not, however, what Lebling chose to do. Instead he decided to devise an actual purpose for our collection beyond looting for looting’s (and points’) sake. Like other elements of Zork II, the need to restructure things for practical reasons here led Lebling to take a step in the direction of story.

Now, late in the game, we penetrate the Wizard’s inner sanctum at last. Amongst other fun and puzzles, we can summon a demon here by making use of the three magic spheres we’ve collected earlier — the one in the Alice area which the robot helped us to collect, the one behind the locked door in the Dreary Room, and one which we find in the aquarium inside the wizard’s inner sanctum itself. But demons, of course, don’t work for free. To do us a favor, he demands payment in the form of ten treasures. Yes, it’s all very pat and convenient, but combined with other innovations like the Wizard himself it gives Zork II a shred of plotting and motivation that both Zork I and the PDP-10 Zork lack. Count it as a step on Infocom’s road from text adventures to interactive fiction.

Once the demon is satisfied, we have a favor at our disposal. Unfortunately, it’s easy neither to figure out what that favor should be nor how we should go about asking for it. If we manage both, though, we’re greeted with this:

>SAY TO DEMON "GIVE ME WAND"
"I HEAR AND OBEY!" SAYS THE DEMON. HE
STRETCHES OUT AN ENORMOUS HAND TOWARDS
THE WAND. THE WIZARD IS UNSURE WHAT TO
DO, POINTING IT THREATENINGLY AT THE
DEMON, THEN AT YOU. "FUDGE!" HE CRIES,
BUT ASIDE FROM A STRONG ODOR OF
CHOCOLATE IN THE AIR, THERE IS NO
EFFECT. THE DEMON PLUCKS THE WAND OUT OF
HIS HAND (IT'S ABOUT TOOTHPICK SIZE TO
HIM) AND GINGERLY LAYS IT ON THE GROUND
BEFORE YOU. HE FADES INTO THE SMOKE,
WHICH DISPERSES. THE WIZARD RUNS FROM
THE ROOM IN TERROR.

And so the tables are turned. I feel a little bit sorry for the poor fellow. He seems more playfully insane than evil. But then again, I feel sorry for a lot of the monsters I have to kill in Wizardry, so count me as just a big softie.

We now have a magic wand at our disposal — a very cool thing. The immediate temptation is to go around waving it at anything and everything, trying out each of the Wizard’s arsenal of spells. Yet for inexplicable in-story reasons but all too explicable technical reasons, only one actually works: Float, which lifts a boulder for us to unblock an entrance in the Menhir Room and retrieve a final key item. I particularly wanted to spell a certain three-headed guard dog in the Cerberus Room, but, alas, my efforts to Ferment, Freeze, and even Filch the hound proved in vain. Only Float gave any sort of appropriate response at all: “THE HUGE DOG RISES ABOUT AN INCH OFF THE GROUND, FOR A MOMENT.” If the implementation here is kind of sketchy, the idea of having a collection of spells at one’s disposal is still a very compelling one, and one that obviously remained with Lebling and his colleagues: they would later produce a trilogy of games that revolved around that very mechanic.

We now make our way into the final room of the game, the crypt. We also now have all 400 points — and yet the game doesn’t end. We in fact have one final puzzle to solve. We need to extinguish the lantern within the crypt, using some grue repellent we found lying around to protect ourselves. In the darkness we can see the “FAINT OUTLINE” of a “VERY TIGHT DOOR,” the way forward into Zork III. It’s yet one final example of a clever little puzzle that just needed a little bit more of a nudge; the solution is arguably hinted at, but much earlier in the game, and so subtly it’s almost impossible not to overlook. For the really unlucky, the game here also unveils its nastiest trick of all. One of the spells the Wizard — luckily, seemingly very rarely — casts is Fluoresce, which causes one to glow with light, apparently in perpetuity. What a lucky break, one thinks; no more worrying about that expiring lantern! Until, of course, one comes here and can’t finish the game. Infocom may have been making them better than anyone else already, but they were still making them pretty damn cruel at times.

But that’s Zork II for you — more sophisticated technically and thematically than its predecessor, but also with more design issues and a wider mean streak. Of course, in evaluating works we always have to be mindful of the milieu that created them. Adventure games in 1981 were cruel and difficult as a matter of course. Infocom in the years to come would be largely responsible for showing that they could succeed as art and challenge as games without hating their players, but they weren’t quite there yet. Likewise, they would show that they could be about more than treasures, puzzles, and points, but Zork II merely nods in that direction rather than striding down that road with purpose. Neither a masterpiece nor an outright failure, Zork II stands as an important way-station rather than a definitive landmark.

Still, those looking for a game changer should just stick around. Infocom’s next release would not completely sort out the adventure-game design issues I’ve been harping on about for many posts now, but it would completely upend the traditional definition of what an adventure game was and what it could do.

There’s a phenomenon we music fans often talk about called the “sophomore slump.” Before signing a record deal and recording that first album, bands generally spend years honing their craft and forging their musical identity. When they go into the studio for the first time at last, they know exactly who they are and what brought them here, and they also have the cream of all those years of songwriting at their disposal — polished, practiced, and audience tested. Yet when it comes time for the second album, assuming they get to make one, things are suddenly much more uncertain. All of those great songs that defined them were used up last time around, and now they’re left to pick through the material that didn’t make the cut and/or craft new stuff under time pressure they’ve never known before. Further, a sort of existential crisis often greets them. What kind of band do they want to be? Should they continue to work within the sound that got them this far, or should they push for more and get more experimental? Many try to split the difference, resulting in an uneven album unwilling to definitively do either, and full of songs and performances that, while perhaps perfectly competent, lack a certain pop, a spark of freshness compared to what came before.

I see some of the same thing in Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz. Lebling and Infocom took some real, significant steps forward here, beginning to move beyond the “collect treasures for points” structure of the first game, but the whole thing feels a bit tentative. Infocom’s parser and world-modeling remain streets beyond what anyone else was doing, but they no longer carry quite the same shock of discovery. The writing gets sharper, funnier, and more consistent in tone, but, at least in the first release we’ll be looking at, the game suffers a bit from the need to have it out before Christmas, with an unusual (for Infocom) number of little bugs, glitches, and parser frustrations. There are some wonderful puzzles here along with some puzzles that just need an extra in-game nudge to be wonderful — in fact, far more of both than in Zork I — but also some absurd howlers, including the two most universally loathed in the entire Infocom canon. They’re proof that, while Lebling felt he should make Zork II harder than its predecessor, he wasn’t yet quite clear on the best way to accomplish that. So, like so many second albums, Zork II is a mixed bag. You can see it in very different ways depending on what you choose to emphasize, and, indeed, you’ll find very diverse opinions about its overall merit.

As I did with Zork I, I’m going to take you on a little tour of Zork II. The map above may help you to follow along. I’m also again making available the somewhat rare original story file for those seeking the most authentic historical experience. You can play it right in your browser, or download it to play in an interpreter that supports the Version 2 Z-Machine. Or you can choose the Apple II disk image.

We begin Zork II just where we presumably left off, inside the barrow which collecting the last of the treasures in Zork I opened up to us. Unlike in the PDP-10 Zork, the barrow has sealed behind us upon entrance, an obvious concession to the need to keep Zork I‘s chocolate separate from Zork II‘s peanut butter. We do have our two most faithful companions from Zork I, our lantern and our sword. (The lantern is also, thankfully, fully charged again for some unexplained reason.)

As soon as we begin to move deeper into the game from our initial location at the extreme north of the map, we see one of the more obvious and welcome signs of progress over its predecessor: Lebling now has no interest at all in making the geography itself into a puzzle. Everything connects with everything else in a consistent, straightforward manner, a far cry from the beginning of Zork I, where we were first challenged to spend an hour or two laboriously mapping all of the twisty intersections of the forest. Zork II doesn’t even feature the heretofore obligatory maze, at least in the conventional sense. (What replaces it is annoying enough that one is left wishing for a good old straightforward maze, but more on that later…)

Soon we have our first encounter with the man who will be our nemesis throughout the game: the Wizard of Frobozz.

A STRANGE LITTLE MAN IN A LONG CLOAK
APPEARS SUDDENLY IN THE ROOM. HE IS
WEARING A HIGH POINTED HAT EMBROIDERED
WITH ASTROLOGICAL SIGNS. HE HAS A LONG,
STRINGY, AND UNKEMPT BEARD.
THE WIZARD DRAWS FORTH HIS WAND AND
WAVES IT IN YOUR DIRECTION. IT BEGINS TO
GLOW WITH A FAINT BLUE GLOW.
THE WIZARD, IN A DEEP AND RESONANT
VOICE, SPEAKS THE WORD "FERMENT!" HE
CACKLES GLEEFULLY.

YOU BEGIN TO FEEL LIGHTHEADED.


The Wizard is one of Lebling’s innovations for the PC Zork II, and interesting on several levels. He appears more frequently and is characterized much more strongly than Zork I‘s thief. While the thief was a mere impediment and annoyance, our central goal in Zork II is to overcome the Wizard; thus his pride of place in the game’s subtitle. But never fear — the Wizard is also every bit as annoying as the thief ever was. He pops up from time to time to cast a randomly chosen spell on us, all of which begin with “F”: Filch, Freeze, Float, Fall, Fence, Fantasize, etc. Some of these, like Ferment, which makes us unable to walk straight for a (randomly chosen) number of turns, are mere inconveniences. Others — like Filch, which causes a randomly chosen item to disappear from our inventory, or Fall, which can kill us instantly if cast on, say, a cliff-side — leave us no recourse but to restore from our last save. What with our expiring, non-renewable light source, even the less potent spells become a problem in forcing us to waste precious turns waiting for their effects to expire. We pretty quickly get into the habit of just restoring every time we get spelled.

Every player will have to decide for herself whether the Wizard is funny enough to outweigh this annoyance factor. But the bumbling old Wizard, whose spells occasionally misfire in amusing ways, is genuinely funny.

THE WIZARD DRAWS FORTH HIS WAND AND
WAVES IT IN YOUR DIRECTION. IT BEGINS TO
GLOW WITH A FAINT BLUE GLOW.
THERE IS A LOUD CRACKLING NOISE. BLUE
SMOKE RISES FROM OUT OF THE WIZARD'S
SLEEVE. HE SIGHS AND DISAPPEARS.

Zork has always had a split personality. Authors give us either unabashedly silly, mildly satirical comedy, or an aged, now deserted world possessed of a lonely, faded grandeur. As the product of multiple authors writing pretty much to suit whatever whims struck them, Zork I itself pioneered both approaches, vacillating between them with no apparent concern. For every majestic Aragain Falls view, there was a cyclops to be fed hot peppers. With Zork II, however, Lebling has clearly decided to craft a “funny Zork.” And so we get various shoddy contraptions labeled as products of “The Frobozz Magic <insert item here> Company,” sort of the Wizard’s equivalent of Wile E. Coyote’s Acme Corporation. And we get lots of silly anecdotes about the excesses of the royal Flathead family and its patriarch, Lord Dimwit himself. Lebling shows a real gift for light comedy throughout, knowing how to craft jokes without trying too hard and beating us over the (flat)head with them.

In a gazebo in the garden, one of Lebling’s new additions, he places an homage to the original Zork, a copy of U.S. News and Dungeon Report.

** U.S. NEWS AND DUNGEON REPORT **


FAMED ADVENTURER TO EXPLORE GREAT
UNDERGROUND EMPIRE

OUR CORRESPONDENTS REPORT THAT A
WORLD-FAMOUS AND BATTLE-HARDENED
ADVENTURER HAS BEEN SEEN IN THE VICINITY
OF THE GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE. LOCAL
GRUES HAVE BEEN REPORTED SHARPENING
THEIR (SLAVERING) FANGS....

"ZORK: THE WIZARD OF FROBOZZ" WAS
WRITTEN BY DAVE LEBLING AND MARC BLANK,
AND IS (C) COPYRIGHT 1981 BY INFOCOM,
INC.

You may remember that a magazine of the same title used to always sit inside the white house of the PDP-10 Zork to announce the latest news and additions to the online community that sprung up around the game.

Like its predecessors, Zork II imposes a pretty harsh inventory limit, forcing us to choose a base of operations to keep all of the stuff we collect. A good choice is the Carousel Room, a central hub around which the game’s geography — literally — revolves. (The game always chooses a random direction for us when we leave the Carousel Room; we can solve a puzzle to stop its rotation.) Indeed, there’s a definite combinatorial explosion that adds greatly to the difficulty. The map is a large one, and largely open from the start, leaving us to pick through piles of unsolved puzzles looking for the ones which we can actually solve at any given point. Just figuring out what we should be working on is much of the challenge.

Southeast of the Carousel Room is the appropriately named Riddle Room. In front of a sealed door we read the following:

WHAT IS TALL AS A HOUSE,
ROUND AS A CUP,
AND ALL THE KING'S HORSES
CAN'T DRAW IT UP?

The answer is a well.

Riddles aren’t really approved practice in interactive-fiction design these days, largely because they’re just so dependent on intuition and all too often very culturally specific, and thus notoriously variable in difficulty from player to player. There’s also a certain element of cheapness about them, a quality they share with mazes. A designer in need of a puzzle can throw in a riddle in a matter of minutes, then watch contentedly as at least some subset of her players agonize for hours. Still, as adventure-game riddles go this one isn’t awful, and there is an undeniable thrill in getting a riddle in a flash of insight — much like when solving other, better respected sorts of adventure-game puzzles. In Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort names the riddle as the text adventure’s most important literary antecedent. I’m not entirely convinced of that, but if true it does present the opportunity to view Zork‘s riddle as this new form already glancing back to its roots. Not that I believe for a moment that anything of the sort was on the designers’ minds.

Beyond the Riddle Room is the Circular Room:

CIRCULAR ROOM

THIS IS A DAMP CIRCULAR ROOM, WHOSE
WALLS ARE MADE OF BRICK AND MORTAR. THE
ROOF OF THIS ROOM IS NOT VISIBLE, BUT
THERE APPEAR TO BE SOME ETCHINGS ON THE
WALLS. THERE IS A PASSAGEWAY TO THE
WEST.

THERE IS A WOODEN BUCKET HERE, 3 FEET IN
DIAMETER AND 3 FEET HIGH.

With a little thought, not to mention some consideration of the riddle we just solved, we can conclude that we are standing at the bottom of a well. It turns out that it’s not just a well, but a magic well; if we pour some water into the bucket, it will hoist us up to a new area at its top. I mentioned earlier that a number of puzzles in Zork II are just a nudge away from being excellent. This one is a good example. While there’s a certain elegant logic to it, we aren’t told that it’s a magic well until we reach the top and see the “Frobozz Magic Well Company” logo. It’s just a little bit too much of a stretch in its present form. Or maybe I’m supposed to be able to find some clue in these etchings found at the bottom:

       O  B  O

       A  G  I
E L

       M  P  A

If anyone can figure out what that’s on about, let me know.

At the top of the well is the so-called “Alice” area. Lewis Carroll would prove to be a great favorite of adventure-game writers because his blend of surrealism, logical illogic, and love of puzzles fit the genre so well, making his works just about as perfect as any traditional literature can be for adaptation to the adventure-game form. Before any official adaptations, however, Infocom paid him homage here. (Like the well area, the Alice area was present in the PDP-10 version, and thus dates to approximately 1978.) We find some cakes with the expected effect on our size, and once appropriately shrunken visit a pool of tears lifted straight from Chapter 2 of Alice in Wonderland. It all makes for some lovely puzzles. It’s sort of amusing that we must travel up a well to visit the Alice area in Zork II, while Alice fell down a well to start her adventures in the book. Of course, there’s also quite a similarity between the premise of the Zork games as a whole and that of the Alice books. Both include vast magical landscapes accessed via the most mundane of gateways, and both are all about puzzles and play rather than plot.

As already demonstrated via the Wizard, Zork II does have a modicum more interpersonal interaction than its predecessor, making adventuring in these dungeons feel just a bit less lonely. For the first time (discounting the PDP-10 version) it allows us to actually talk to other characters, entering into some fraught territory that still bedevils IF authors today. Zork II‘s system is still pretty awkward: we can only “TELL <someone> ‘<something>’,” with the quotes a necessity. It does, however, allow for a pretty impressive demonstration of Infocom’s technology, in the form of a little robot also located at the top of the well whom we can order about just as if he were, well, us. (Like Zork I, Zork II happily jumps from science-fiction robots to fantasy monsters to present-day elements with no compunction whatsoever.) The robot is key to another of those puzzles that just needed a little bit more work to be great.

There’s a magical sphere that we’d really like to loot, but it’s protected by the “Frobozz Magic Alarm Company.” When we try to take it, a cage drops around us, the room fills with a poison gas, and we die after a couple of turns. Trying to get the robot to take the sphere for us doesn’t work. The cage crushes the poor little guy rather than merely trapping him for some reason, in a scene oddly reminiscent of a famous incident from Infocom’s later Planetfall. The sphere, meanwhile, disappears (presumably it’s inside the cage). The solution is to have the robot in the room with us when we trigger the trap, then have him “GET CAGE” to get us free before the gas asphyxiates us. In the abstract it’s not a bad puzzle. However, it’s so fraught with implementation problems that it’s well-nigh impossible to deduce what’s really going on. The game gives us no sign that we can still interact with the robot at all from inside the cage. Even if we make that cognitive leap on our own, it still refuses to make anything easy for us.

>GET SPHERE
AS YOU REACH FOR THE SPHERE, A STEEL
CAGE FALLS FROM THE CEILING TO ENTRAP
YOU. TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE, POISONOUS
GAS STARTS COMING INTO THE ROOM.
CAGE
YOU ARE TRAPPED INSIDE A STEEL CAGE.
>TELL ROBOT "GET GAS"
I DON'T KNOW THE WORD 'GAS'.
>TELL ROBOT "HELP"
I DON'T KNOW THE WORD 'HELP'.
>TELL ROBOT "N"
"WHIRR, BUZZ, CLICK!"
YOU CAN'T GO THAT WAY.
>L
CAGE
YOU ARE TRAPPED INSIDE A STEEL CAGE.
>EXAMINE CAGE
I SEE NOTHING SPECIAL ABOUT THE STEEL
CAGE.
>TELL ROBOT "BREAK CAGE"
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BREAK THE CAGE WITH?
>ROBOT
TRYING TO DESTROY THE STEEL CAGE HAS NO
EFFECT.
>TELL ROBOT "GET CAGE"
THE CAGE SHAKES AND IS HURLED ACROSS THE
ROOM. IT'S HARD TO SAY, BUT THE ROBOT
APPEARS TO BE SMILING.
DINGY CLOSET
THERE IS A BEAUTIFUL RED CRYSTAL SPHERE
HERE.
>GET SPHERE
TAKEN.

I’ve edited out from the above the dying every couple of turns.

Questions abound. Where actually was the sphere when we were inside the cage, since it was apparently neither inside nor outside? Why does “GETting” the cage cause the robot to break it, and “BREAKing” it get us nowhere? It’s issues like this that sometimes make Zork II, at least in this first released version, feel a bit undercooked.

With Zork on the market and proving to be a major hit, it was time for Infocom to think about the inevitable sequel. The task of preparing it fell to Dave Lebling. At first glance, it looked straightforward enough. He needed only take the half of the original PDP-10 Zork that had not made it into the PC version, label it Zork II, and be done with it. In actuality, however, it was a little more complicated. The new game would at a minimum have to have some restructuring. For example, the goal of the PDP-10 Zork, like the PC version, was to deliver a collection of treasures to the white house outside of which the player started the game. Yet in Zork II said house would not exist. Perhaps motivated at first largely by necessity, Lebling began to tinker with the original design. Soon, inspired by the new ZIL technology Infocom had developed to let them port Zork to the PC, technology that was actually more flexible, more powerful, and simpler to work with than the MDL behind the original Zork, Lebling began to dramatically reshape the design, interspersing elements from the original with new areas, puzzles, and characters. In the end, he would use only about half of the leftover PDP-10 material, which in turn would make up about half of Zork II; the other half would be new. Lebling thus became the first implementer to consciously craft an Infocom game, for sale as a commercial product on PCs.

To the outside world, Infocom now began to establish the corporate personality that people would soon come to love almost as much as their games — a chummy, witty inclusiveness that made people who bought the games feel like they had just signed up for a “smart persons club.” Rather than one of the Zork creators or even one of the Infocom shareholders, the organizer and guider of the club was Mike Dornbrook, a recent MIT biology graduate who had come to Zork only in 1980, as the first and most important playtester of the PC version.

More than anyone else around Infocom, Dornbrook was a believer in Zork, convinced it was far more than an interesting hacking exercise, a way to get some money coming in en route to more serious products, or even “just” a really fun game. He saw Zork as something new under the sun, something that could in some small way change the world. He strongly encouraged Infocom to build a community around this nascent new art form. At his behest, the earliest version of Zork included the following message on a note in the artist’s studio:

Congratulations!
You are the privileged owner of a genuine ZORK Great Underground Empire (Part I), a self contained and self maintaining universe. As a legitimate owner, you have available to you both the Movement Assistance Planner (MAP) and Hierarchical Information for Novice Treasure Seekers (HINTS). For information about these and other services, send a stamped, self-addressed, business-size envelope to:

Infocom, Inc.
GUE I Maintenance Division
PO Box 120, Kendall Station
Cambridge, Mass. 02142

Joining the smart-persons club was at this stage still quite a complicated process. The aforementioned self-addressed envelope would be retrieved by Stu Galley, who dutifully visited the post office each day. He then sent back a sheet offering a map for purchase, as well as the ultimate personalized hint service; for a couple of dollars a pop, Infocom would personally answer queries.

The map was adapted from Lebling’s original by Dave Ardito, an artist friend of Galley’s who embellished the lines and boxes with some appropriately adventurous visual flourishes. Dornbrook, who had some experience with printing, used his MIT alumni status to print the maps in the middle of the night on a big printing press that normally produced posters and flyers for upcoming campus events. He enlisted his roommate, Steve Meretzky, to help him.

Meretzky was also an MIT alum, having graduated in 1979 with a degree in construction management. He may have gone to the most important computer-science university in the world, but Meretzky wanted no part of that world. He “despised” computers and hackers. In Get Lamp‘s Infocom feature, Dornbrook described Meretzky’s introduction to Zork. Dornbrook was testing the game, and had borrowed a TRS-80 and brought it home to their apartment, where he set it up on the kitchen table.

He [Meretzky] came in the back door and saw the computer and said, “Away!” as only Steve could. I started telling him, “Steve, you’re going to love this!” I was trying to explain to him how to start the game up, and he puts his hands over his ears and starts screaming so he can’t hear me.

But apparently he heard enough. Over the course of the next several weeks, I started noticing when I’d come home and was about to start testing again that the keyboard might have moved half an inch or my notes had moved slightly. I realized Steve was playing the game but wasn’t willing to admit it. One night he finally broke down and said, “Alright! Alright! I need a hint!” And that was the beginning of the end for Steve.

Meretzky soon signed up as a tester, and also joined Dornbrook in his other Infocom-related projects.

There’s a great interview amongst the Get Lamp extras with David Shaw, an MIT student who wrote for the campus newspaper, whose offices were just above the press Dornbrook and Meretzky were surreptitiously borrowing. Shaw was confused by the fact that the press “always seemed to be running,” even when there were no new campus events to promote: “There were always the same two or three guys down there. They were printing something out that clearly wasn’t a movie poster, but they were also being very cagey about what it was they were printing.” One day Shaw found Dornbrook and Meretzky’s apparent “discard pile” of Zork maps and realized at last what was going on.

While the maps were a team effort, hints fell entirely to Dornbrook. He hand-wrote replies on ordinary paper. After a time he found it to be quite a profitable, if occasionally tedious, endeavor. Because most of the queries were variations on the same handful of questions, crafting personal answers didn’t take as much time as one might expect. (See the Infocom section of the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities for scans of the original maps and, even better, a couple of Dornbrook’s handwritten replies to hint requests.)

Then Dornbrook was accepted into an MBA program at the University of Chicago, scheduled to begin in the fall, meaning of course that he would have to leave Boston and give up day-to-day contact with the Infocom folks. No one else felt equipped to replace Dornbrook, who had by this point become in reality if not title Infocom’s head of public relations. Dornbrook, concerned about what would happen to “his” loyal customers, tried to convince President Joel Berez to hire a replacement. Impossible, Berez replied; the company just didn’t yet have the resources to devote someone to nothing but customer relations. So Dornbrook pitched another idea. He would form a new company, the Zork Users Group, to sell hints, maps, memorabilia, and even Infocom games themselves at a slight discount to eager players who joined his new club, which he would run out of Chicago between classes. Infocom in turn would be relieved of this burden. They could simply refer hint requests to Dornbrook, and worry only about making more and better games. Berez agreed, and ZUG was officially born in October of 1981. It would peak at over 20,000 members — but more about that in future posts.

Through much of 1981, Infocom assumed that Personal Software, publisher of the first Zork, would also publish Zork II. After all, Zork was a substantial hit. And indeed, PS responded positively when Infocom first talked with them about Zork II in April. The two companies went so far as to sign a contract that June. But just a few months later PS suddenly pulled the deal. Further, they also announced that they would be dropping the first Zork as well. What happened? wondered Infocom.

What had happened, of course, was VisiCalc. Dan Fylstra, founder of PS, had nurtured Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston’s creation from its very early days, donating an Apple II to the pair to help them develop their idea. Once released in October of 1979, VisiCalc transformed the microcomputer industry — and transformed its publisher. PS, formerly a publisher of games and hobbyist programs, was suddenly “the VisiCalc publisher,” one of the hottest up-and-coming companies in the country. As big as Zork was, it didn’t amount to much in comparison to VisiCalc. By 1981 games and hobbyist software made up less than 10 percent of PS’s revenue. Small wonder that Infocom often felt like their game was something of an afterthought for PS. Now the IBM PC was on the horizon, and PS found itself being courted even by the likes of Big Blue themselves, who needed for VisiCalc to be available on their new computer. Just as Microsoft was also doing at this time, PS began to reshape themselves, leaving behind their hacker and hobbyist roots to focus on the exploding market for VisiCalc and other business software. They began doing in-house development for the first time, rolling out a whole line of programs to capitalize on the VisiCalc name: VisiDex, VisiPlot, VisiTrend, VisiTerm, VisiFile. The following year PS would complete their Visification by renaming themselves VisiCorp, en route to disappearing up their own VisiBum in one of the more spectacular flameouts in software history.

In this new paradigm Zork was not just unnecessary but potentially dangerous. Games were anathema to the new army of pinstriped business customers suddenly buying PCs. Companies like PS, who wished to serve them and be taken seriously despite their own questionable hacker origins, thus began to give anything potentially entertaining a wide berth. The games line would have to go, victim of the same paranoia that kept Infocom’s own Al Vezza up at night.

This rejection left Infocom at a crossroads. It wasn’t, mind you, a disaster; there would doubtlessly be plenty of other publishers eager to sign them now that they had a hit game under their belt. Yet they weren’t sure that was the direction they wanted to go. While there was a certain prestige in being published by the biggest software publisher in the world, they had never really been satisfied with PS. They had always felt like a low priority. The awful Zork “barbarian” packaging PS had come up with made one wonder if anyone at PS had actually bothered to play the game, and promotion efforts had felt cursory and disinterested. Certainly PS had never shown the slightest interest in helping Infocom and Dornbrook to build a loyal customer base. If they wanted to build Infocom as a brand, as the best text adventures in the business, why should they have another company’s logo on their boxes?

But of course becoming a publisher would require Infocom to become a “real” company rather than one that did business from a P.O. Box, with more people involved and real money invested. In a choice between keeping Infocom a profitable little sideline or, well, going for it, the Infocom founders chose the latter.

Several of them secured a substantial loan to bankroll the transition. They also secured a fellow named Mort Rosenthal as marketing manager. He lasted less than a year with Infocom, getting himself fired when he overstepped his authority to offer Infocom’s games to Radio Shack at a steep discount that would get them into every single store. Before that, however, he worked wonders, and not just in marketing. A natural wheeler and dealer, he in Stu Galley’s words secured “a time-shared production plant in Randolph, an ad agency in Watertown, an order-taking service in New Jersey, a supplier of disks in California, and so on,” all in a matter of weeks. He also found them their first tiny office above Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall Marketplace. The first two salaried employees to come to work there became Berez, the company’s most prominent business mind, and Marc Blank, the architect of the Z-Machine who had already more than a year before set aside his medical internship and moved back to Boston to take a flyer on the venture.

Showing an instinct for public perception that’s surprising to find in a bunch of hackers, Infocom made one last deal with PS — to buy back PS’s remaining copies of Zork and prevent them from dumping the games onto the market at a discount, thus devaluing the Zork brand. They needed to have Zork II out in time for Christmas, and so worked frantically with the advertising agency Rosenthal had found to craft a whole new look for the series. The motif they came up with was much more appropriate and classy than the old PS barbarian. In fact, it remains the established “look” of Zork to this day.

Ironically for a company whose games were all text, Infocom’s level of visual refinement set them apart, not least in the classic logo that debuted at this time and would remain a fixture for the rest of the company’s life. But speaking of text: in Zork II‘s advertising and packaging we can already see the rhetorical voice that Infocom fans would come to know, a seemingly casual, humorous vibe that nevertheless reflected an immense amount of care — this at a time when most game publishers still seemed to consider even basic grammar of little concern. In comparison to everybody else, Infocom just seemed a little bit classier, a little bit smarter, a little bit more adult. It’s an image that would serve them well.

Next time we’ll accept the invitation above and dive into Zork II itself, which did indeed make it out just in time for Christmas.

Today we’ll finish up with Zork. That means plunging into the only big, completely traditional maze in the Infocom canon. And it’s a nasty one; apparently they decided that if you’re only going to do one, you might as well do it up right.

In keeping with the thief’s role as a stand-in for Adventure‘s pirate, the maze is where he has his lair. This fact, even more than its sheer size, is the root of its difficulty: as you wander about inside dropping items and mapping, chances are good that the thief will show up to scatter your carefully placed items about and leave you hopelessly confused. Like the combat sequences, success here requires luck and careful saving and restoring more than skill. Nowhere else does Zork so thoroughly justify Robb Sherwin’s statement that it “hates its player.”

Within the maze is the “CYCLOPS ROOM.”

>SE
CYCLOPS ROOM
THIS ROOM HAS AN EXIT ON THE NORTHWEST,
AND A STAIRCASE LEADING UP.
A CYCLOPS, WHO LOOKS PREPARED TO EAT
HORSES (MUCH LESS MERE ADVENTURERS),
BLOCKS THE STAIRCASE. FROM HIS STATE OF
HEALTH, AND THE BLOODSTAINS ON THE
WALLS, YOU GATHER THAT HE IS NOT VERY
FRIENDLY, THOUGH HE LIKES PEOPLE.

There are two possible solutions to the cyclops problem, one basically acceptable and one easily the worst in the game. For the former, we can give him the lunch we found in the house at the beginning of the game, followed by the bottle of water. The latter is another guess-the-word affair that makes the loud room look like design genius: we can type “ODYSSEUS.”

>ODYSSEUS
THE CYCLOPS, HEARING THE NAME OF HIS
FATHER'S DEADLY NEMESIS, FLEES THE ROOM
BY KNOCKING DOWN THE WALL ON THE EAST OF
THE ROOM.

But never fear, there is a “clue” to this solution. Reading a prayer book we found in the temple yields the following:

>EXAMINE BOOK
COMMANDMENT #12592

OH YE WHO GO ABOUT SAYING UNTO EACH:
“HELLO SAILOR”:
DOST THOU KNOW THE MAGNITUDE OF THY SIN
BEFORE THE GODS?
YEA, VERILY, THOU SHALT BE GROUND
BETWEEN TWO STONES.
SHALL THE ANGRY GODS CAST THY BODY INTO
THE WHIRLPOOL?
SURELY, THY EYE SHALL BE PUT OUT WITH A
SHARP STICK!
EVEN UNTO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH SHALT
THOU WANDER AND
UNTO THE LAND OF THE DEAD SHALT THOU BE
SENT AT LAST.
SURELY THOU SHALT REPENT OF THY CUNNING.

On the original PDP-10 implementation, reading the first letter of each line yields “ODYSSEUS.” On the 40-column Apple II screen, however, this rather breaks down. It’s an awful “puzzle,” but the fact that Infocom give the player a more reasonable alternative really marks them, for all their continuing design pratfalls, as unusual text-adventure developers for this era. Scott Adams or Roberta Williams would have just stuck the easy-to-implement “ODYSSEUS” puzzle in and dreamed of all the hint booklets they were about to sell.

Beyond the cyclops lies the thief’s lair. Giving him his reckoning feels sweet indeed after all the trouble he’s caused us, not to mention restoring to us whatever treasures he’s stolen.

>U
YOU HEAR A SCREAM OF ANGUISH AS YOU
VIOLATE THE ROBBER'S HIDEAWAY. USING
PASSAGES UNKNOWN TO YOU, HE RUSHES TO
ITS DEFENSE.
THE THIEF GESTURES MYSTERIOUSLY, AND THE
TREASURES IN THE ROOM SUDDENLY VANISH.
TREASURE ROOM
THIS IS A LARGE ROOM, WHOSE EAST WALL IS
SOLID GRANITE. A NUMBER OF DISCARDED
BAGS, WHICH CRUMBLE AT YOUR TOUCH, ARE
SCATTERED ABOUT ON THE FLOOR. THERE IS
AN EXIT DOWN A STAIRCASE.
THERE IS A SUSPICIOUS-LOOKING
INDIVIDUAL, HOLDING A BAG, LEANING
AGAINST ONE WALL. HE IS ARMED WITH A
VICIOUS-LOOKING STILETTO.
THERE IS A SILVER CHALICE, INTRICATELY
ENGRAVED, HERE.
THE THIEF RAMS THE HAFT OF HIS BLADE
INTO YOUR STOMACH, LEAVING YOU OUT OF
BREATH.
>KILL THIEF WITH AXE
YOU ARE STILL RECOVERING FROM THAT LAST
BLOW, SO YOUR ATTACK IS INEFFECTIVE.
YOU PARRY A LIGHTNING THRUST, AND THE
THIEF SALUTES YOU WITH A GRIM NOD.
>KILL THIEF WITH AXE
THE THIEF IS STRUCK ON THE ARM, BLOOD
BEGINS TO TRICKLE DOWN.
THE THIEF STABS NONCHALANTLY WITH HIS
STILETTO AND MISSES.
>AGAIN
THE BLOW LANDS, MAKING A SHALLOW GASH IN
THE THIEF'S ARM!
THE THIEF TRIES TO SNEAK PAST YOUR
GUARD, BUT YOU TWIST AWAY.
>AGAIN
THE BLOW LANDS, MAKING A SHALLOW GASH IN
THE THIEF'S ARM!
THE THIEF SLOWLY APPROACHES, STRIKES
LIKE A SNAKE, AND LEAVES YOU WOUNDED.
>AGAIN
THE THIEF IS STRUCK ON THE ARM, BLOOD
BEGINS TO TRICKLE DOWN.
THE THIEF STABS NONCHALANTLY WITH HIS
STILETTO AND MISSES.
>AGAIN
YOU CHARGE, BUT THE THIEF JUMPS NIMBLY
ASIDE.
THE THIEF STABS NONCHALANTLY WITH HIS
STILETTO AND MISSES.
>AGAIN
THE FATAL BLOW STRIKES THE THIEF SQUARE
IN THE HEART: HE DIES.


But wait… remember when I mentioned way back at the beginning of this adventure that the jeweled egg we found in the forest was key to the cruelest puzzle in the game? Well, I’m afraid we need to get the thief to do something for us before we kill him. We need to let him open the egg for us, for, as subtly hinted when we try to do it ourselves, we “HAVEN’T THE TOOLS OR EXPERTISE.”

With the maze explored and the thief employed and then promptly dispatched, we face only one last puzzle — but it’s another nasty one, a late addition that we could just as well have done without. From time to time while wandering in the forest, we “HEAR IN THE DISTANCE THE CHIRPING OF A SONG BIRD,” a message originally included as just a bit of flavor text. Tim Anderson:

Many people on the net had long since solved the game, but went back in and did any new problems that came along; one of them had played DD with Dave, and called him up about a day after the egg was announced. "I've gotten the egg opened, but I assume you losers have some nonsense where you do something with the canary and the songbird. Dave, no fool, said "Cough, cough, ahem, of course," and immediately went off and added the brass bauble.

Specifically, we need to wind the clockwork canary we found inside the egg to attract the songbird, which in turn drops a brass bauble at our feet — the 19th and final treasure. We place the lot in the trophy case, which magically opens up a new path outside.

>SW
STONE BARROW
YOU ARE STANDING IN FRONT OF A MASSIVE
BARROW OF STONE. IN THE EAST FACE IS A
HUGE STONE DOOR WHICH IS OPEN. YOU
CANNOT SEE INTO THE DARK OF THE TOMB.
>W
AS YOU ENTER THE BARROW, THE DOOR CLOSES
INEXORABLY BEHIND YOU. AROUND YOU IT IS
DARK, BUT AHEAD IS AN ENORMOUS CAVERN,
BRIGHTLY LIT. THROUGH ITS CENTER RUNS A
WIDE STREAM. SPANNING THE STREAM IS A
SMALL WOODEN FOOTBRIDGE, AND BEYOND A
PATH LEADS INTO A DARK TUNNEL. ABOVE THE
BRIDGE, FLOATING IN THE AIR, IS A LARGE
SIGN. IT READS: ALL YE WHO STAND BEFORE
THIS BRIDGE HAVE COMPLETED A GREAT AND
PERILOUS ADVENTURE WHICH HAS TESTED YOUR
WIT AND COURAGE. YOU HAVE GAINED THE
MASTERY OF THE FIRST PART OF THE GREAT
UNDERGROUND EMPIRE. THOSE WHO PASS OVER
THIS BRIDGE MUST BE PREPARED TO
UNDERTAKE AN EVEN GREATER ADVENTURE THAT
WILL SEVERELY TEST YOUR SKILL AND
BRAVERY!
PLAY "ZORK: THE GREAT UNDERGROUND
EMPIRE, PART II".
YOUR SCORE WOULD BE 350 (TOTAL OF 350
POINTS), IN 1313 MOVES.
THIS SCORE GIVES YOU THE RANK OF MASTER
ADVENTURER.

And that, my friends, is Zork, a flawed creation but a tremendous advance over what had come before. And Infocom were just getting started.

I’ll have much, much more to say about Infocom in the future. But next, something completely different.

Today we’ll tackle the meat of Zork‘s Great Underground Empire, shown on the map below.

Exploring south from the cellar where we left off yields our second treasure and our first way out of the underground; we can carry exactly two items out with us via the fireplace in the living room of the white house. (But we can’t go back down that way; “ONLY SANTA CLAUS CLIMBS DOWN CHIMNEYS,” the game tells us, in a classic bit of adventure-game logic.) As we explore we’ll continue to find more and more — and more and more convenient — means of ingress and egress. Eventually, even the unknown nasty who keeps closing and barring the trapdoor behind us will stop it.

We also find a second note — oops, an “OWNER’s MANUAL” — south of the cellar. It conveys some of the wonder of this little, functioning world Infocom have constructed.

>EXAMINE PAPER

CONGRATULATIONS!
YOU ARE THE PRIVILEGED OWNER OF A
GENUINE ZORK GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE
(PART I), A SELF CONTAINED AND SELF
MAINTAINING UNIVERSE. IF USED AND
MAINTAINED IN ACCORDANCE WITH NORMAL
OPERATING PRACTICES FOR SMALL UNIVERSES,
ZORK WILL PROVIDE MANY MONTHS OF
TROUBLE-FREE OPERATION. PLEASE CHECK
WITH YOUR DEALER FOR PART II AND OTHER
ALTERNATE UNIVERSES.

Like the title page shown in my previous post, the note also shows that Infocom were also already planning at least a Zork 2 at this stage, even if their naming rubric could still use some work. More interestingly, it also shows that they were already envisioning parlaying ZIL and the Z-Machine into a whole line of other, original games. In including an advertisement for other games within this one, Infocom were following the lead of Scott Adams, who always seemed to find space to plug one or two other current or upcoming games even within his tiny 16 K creations.

When we proceed north from the cellar, we run into a sort of perfect storm of bad luck.

>N
THE TROLL ROOM
THIS IS A SMALL ROOM WITH PASSAGES TO
THE EAST AND SOUTH AND A FORBIDDING HOLE
LEADING WEST. BLOODSTAINS AND DEEP
SCRATCHES (PERHAPS MADE BY AN AXE) MAR
THE WALLS.
A NASTY-LOOKING TROLL, BRANDISHING A
BLOODY AXE, BLOCKS ALL PASSAGES OUT OF
THE ROOM.
A SEEDY-LOOKING INDIVIDUAL WITH A LARGE
BAG JUST WANDERED THROUGH THE ROOM. ON
THE WAY THROUGH, HE QUIETLY ABSTRACTED
ALL VALUABLES FROM THE ROOM AND FROM
YOUR POSSESSION, MUMBLING SOMETHING
ABOUT "DOING UNTO OTHERS BEFORE.."
THE TROLL'S MIGHTY BLOW DROPS YOU TO
YOUR KNEES.
THE THIEF SLOWLY APPROACHES, STRIKES
LIKE A SNAKE, AND LEAVES YOU WOUNDED.
>KILL TROLL WITH SWORD
I CAN'T SEE ANY SWORD HERE.
>KILL TROLL WITH KNIFE
A GOOD STROKE, BUT IT'S TOO SLOW, THE
TROLL DODGES.
THE TROLL'S AXE REMOVES YOUR HEAD.
IT APPEARS THAT THAT LAST BLOW WAS TOO
MUCH FOR YOU. I'M AFRAID YOU ARE DEAD.

**** YOU HAVE DIED ****

What’s happened here is that we’ve simultaneously met two of the other inhabitants of the underground, the troll and the thief. The former stays in place, but the latter is Zork‘s response to the pirate and the dwarfs of Adventure, a classic Dungeons and Dragons-style “wandering monster.” He roams throughout the underground, and not only takes the occasional poke at us with his stiletto, but — worse — picks up items we might have left here or there for safekeeping and scatters them randomly about. Even worse, he takes treasures for himself, hiding them away (more on that later). And worst of all, he’s happy to steal things off our own person. Woe to the adventurer whom he leaves in the dark without a lamp! In this case, he steals our sword just as we kind of need it to fight him and the troll and all, leaving us with only the much less effective knife. The end result is predictable.

The credit (or blame) for the combat engine belongs to Lebling:

Dave, an old Dungeons and Dragons player, didn’t like the completely predictable ways of killing creatures off. In the original game, for example, one killed a troll by throwing a knife at him; he would catch the knife and gleefully eat it (like anything else you threw at him), but hemorrhage as a result. Dave added basically the full complexity of DD-style fighting, with different strengths for different weapons, wounds, unconsciousness, and death. Each creature had its own set of messages, so a fight with the thief (who uses a stiletto) would be very different from a fight with the troll and his axe.

The danger of all this dynamism and emergent behavior is that it can lead to exactly the sort of thing that just happened to us, where the player is killed capriciously, without ever really having a chance. Eamon players never seemed to mind that sort of thing, but it didn’t sit well with Infocom. They would back well away from randomized combat in later games, a bias that the modern interactive fiction community has generally taken to heart. The main sign of this road not taken in the later Infocom canon is the “DIAGNOSE” verb, introduced in Zork to give the player a quick rundown of her current wounds, which persisted in later games as a rather pointless oddity generally yielding a generic response. Notably, “DIAGNOSE” is the only standard verb of the Infocom system that was not adapted by more modern IF languages like Inform and TADS.

Anyway, we restore a time or two, get a bit more lucky with our die rolls, kill the troll and avoid the thief, and move on into the reservoir area and, eventually, Flood Control Dam #3, one of the more memorable Zork landmarks. The relatively sober descriptions of the grand, long abandoned edifice itself are contrasted with the silliness of the guidebook we find inside the lobby.

>EXAMINE GUIDEBOOK
"FLOOD CONTROL DAM #3
FCD#3 WAS CONSTRUCTED IN YEAR 783 OF
THE GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE TO HARNESS
THE MIGHTY FRIGID RIVER. THIS WORK WAS
SUPPORTED BY A GRANT OF 37 MILLION
ZORKMIDS FROM YOUR OMNIPOTENT LOCAL
TYRANT LORD DIMWIT FLATHEAD THE
EXCESSIVE. THIS IMPRESSIVE STRUCTURE IS
COMPOSED OF 370,000 CUBIC FEET OF
CONCRETE, IS 256 FEET TALL AT THE
CENTER, AND 193 FEET WIDE AT THE TOP.
THE LAKE CREATED BEHIND THE DAM HAS A
VOLUME OF 1.7 BILLION CUBIC FEET, AN
AREA OF 12 MILLION SQUARE FEET, AND A
SHORE LINE OF 36 THOUSAND FEET.
WE WILL NOW POINT OUT SOME OF THE MORE
INTERESTING FEATURES OF FCD#3 AS WE
CONDUCT YOU ON A GUIDED TOUR OF THE
FACILITIES:
1) YOU START YOUR TOUR HERE IN
THE DAM LOBBY. YOU WILL NOTICE ON
YOUR RIGHT THAT .........

Much of Zork‘s literary character, which comes through quite distinctly despite the relatively limited number of actual words in the game (it’s mostly been the very longest descriptions that I’ve been quoting here), arises from this juxtaposition of melancholic, faded glory and unabashed silliness. I’ll let you decide whether that was a real aesthetic choice or the accidental result of having too many cooks (writers) in the kitchen. In any case, we find another prime example of said silliness in the dam’s maintenance room.

>N
MAINTENANCE ROOM
THIS IS WHAT APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN THE
MAINTENANCE ROOM FOR FLOOD CONTROL DAM
#3. APPARENTLY, THIS ROOM HAS BEEN
RANSACKED RECENTLY, FOR MOST OF THE
VALUABLE EQUIPMENT IS GONE. ON THE WALL
IN FRONT OF YOU IS A GROUP OF BUTTONS,
WHICH ARE LABELLED IN EBCDIC. HOWEVER,
THEY ARE OF DIFFERENT COLORS: BLUE,
YELLOW, BROWN, AND RED. THE DOORS TO
THIS ROOM ARE IN THE WEST AND SOUTH
ENDS.
THERE IS A GROUP OF TOOL CHESTS HERE.
THERE IS A WRENCH HERE.
THERE IS AN OBJECT WHICH LOOKS LIKE A
TUBE OF TOOTHPASTE HERE.
THERE IS A SCREWDRIVER HERE.

The “EBCDIC” reference is a bit of hacker humor that might, depending on your background, require some explanation. During the early 1960s most computer makers agreed on something called ASCII (“American Standard Code for Information Interchange”) as a system for encoding textual characters on computers. Since computers can ultimately understand only numbers, ASCII is essentially a look-up table that the computer can use to know that when it encounters, say, the number 65 in a text file, it should print the character “A” to the screen. A standard was necessary to ensure that computers of different makes and models could easily exchange textual information amongst themselves. Just as everyone had settled on ASCII and thus solved a rather vexing problem, however, IBM suddenly chose to abandon the standard on its mainframes in favor of something called EBCDIC (“Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code”). Its reason for doing so, at least according to DEC hackers, was a deliberate effort to make its machines incapable of exchanging data with those from other manufacturers, in the belief that doing so would lock its customers into using only IBM products for absolutely everything. To make things worse, EBCDIC was just a bad system in comparison to ASCII. In ASCII “A” numerically precedes “B” which precedes “C,” etc.; in EBCDIC each letter is assigned a number willy-nilly, with no apparent rhyme or reason. This makes, say, looping through the alphabet, a scenario that comes up quite often in programming, much more difficult than it ought to be. And then there was IBM’s habit of constantly revising EBCDIC, making it even incompatible with itself in its various versions. Still, it persists even today on the big legacy mainframes. Among hackers, EBCDIC came to stand in for any incomprehensible bit of language or jibberish, the hacker equivalent of saying (with apologies to anyone who actually speaks Greek), “It’s Greek to me!” And that, to make a long explanation not much longer, is the reason that the dam’s buttons are labelled in EBCDIC.

We solve a clever puzzle at the dam to adjust the water level on its two sides, thus opening up the river and the northern part of the underground for exploration. Before we do that, though, we’ll have a look at the temple to the southeast. We find there an ivory torch that, in addition to being a treasure, functions as an inexhaustable light source. This bit of mercy is even more appreciated than the extra batteries we can find in Adventure, particularly since using it doesn’t cost us points. We just need to be sure we conserve enough lantern-life to get us through the coal mine, about which more in a moment.

The sceptre, a treasure we find under the temple in the “EGYPTIAN ROOM,” is at the heart of the first really bad puzzle of the game. We are expected to take it to the rainbow outside and wave it to cross and reveal the inevitable pot of gold.

>WAVE SCEPTRE
SUDDENLY, THE RAINBOW APPEARS TO BECOME
SOLID AND, I VENTURE, WALKABLE (I THINK
THE GIVEAWAY WAS THE STAIRS AND
BANNISTER).
>E
ON THE RAINBOW
YOU ARE ON TOP OF A RAINBOW (I BET YOU
NEVER THOUGHT YOU WOULD WALK ON A
RAINBOW), WITH A MAGNIFICENT VIEW OF THE
FALLS. THE RAINBOW TRAVELS EAST-WEST
HERE.

If you’ve played a few adventure games, of course, you fully expected to walk on that rainbow. The question is how you’re supposed to arrive at this particular way of doing it. The one real hint is external to the game: Adventure featured a rod that it was possible to wave to cross a similar (albeit rainbow-less) chasm. Thus we have yet another point where Zork simply seems to assume previous knowledge of Adventure — although even given that knowledge solving this puzzle requires quite an intuitive leap.

After exploring the region beyond the rainbow, we return underground and eventually wind up in… Hades.

>D
ENTRANCE TO HADES
YOU ARE OUTSIDE A LARGE GATEWAY, ON
WHICH IS INSCRIBED
"ABANDON EVERY HOPE, ALL YE WHO
ENTER HERE."
THE GATE IS OPEN; THROUGH IT YOU CAN SEE
A DESOLATION, WITH A PILE OF MANGLED
BODIES IN ONE CORNER. THOUSANDS OF
VOICES, LAMENTING SOME HIDEOUS FATE, CAN
BE HEARD.
THE WAY THROUGH THE GATE IS BARRED BY
EVIL SPIRITS, WHO JEER AT YOUR ATTEMPTS
TO PASS.

Some of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink feel that characterized the original PDP-10 Zork also comes through here. For all of the original mythology found in Lord Dimwit Flathead, zorkmids, and Flood Control Dam #3, we’ve also got here Hades from Greek mythology with a Dante paraphrase to boot. (Indeed, this feels more like the Christian Hell than the mythological Hades; its chilling tone provides yet another contrast to the more jokey sections.) Soon enough, we’ll also be meeting a nineteenth-century American coal mine and an Odysseus-fearing cyclops. And we’ve already visited (and plundered) the tomb of Ramses II. There’s of course a puzzle to be solved in this Hades as well, but I’ll leave that one to you. Afterward, we’ll return to the vicinity of the dam for a trip down the river.

The Frigid River section was the work of Marc Blank, who added it quite early in Zork‘s development. Its key component is the inflatable boat that we must use to navigate it. This implementation of a vehicle arguably marked the first point where Zork‘s makers really showed their willingness to go beyond their inspiration of Adventure by modeling a much more intricate, believable storyworld. It also brought with it some harsh lessons in design. Tim Anderson:

In the original game, there were rooms, objects, and a player; the player always existed in some room. Vehicles were objects that became, in effect, mobile rooms. This required changes in the (always delicate) interactions among verbs, objects, and rooms (we had to have some way of making “walk” do something reasonable when the player was in the boat). In addition, ever-resourceful Zorkers tried to use the boat anywhere they thought they could. The code for the boat itself was not designed to function outside the river section, but nothing kept the player from carrying the deflated boat to the reservoir and trying to sail across. Eventually the boat was allowed in the reservoir, but the general problem always remained: anything that changes the world you’re modelling changes practically everything in the world you’re modelling.

Although Zork was only a month old, it could already surprise its authors. The boat, due to the details of its implementation, turned into a “bag of holding”: players could put practically anything into it and carry it around, even if the weight of the contents far exceeded what a player was allowed to carry. The boat was two separate objects: the “inflated boat” object contained the objects, but the player carried the “deflated boat” object around. We knew nothing about this: someone finally reported it to us as a bug. As far as I know, the bug is still there.

I wasn’t able to reproduce this bug in this early Apple II implementation. More’s the pity; a bag of holding would be nice to have in this game. (Update: Turns out this bug is still there. I just wasn’t clever enough to figure out how to exploit it. See Nathan’s comment below for the details.)

After the Frigid River, which turns out to connect with the Aragain Falls outdoors, we next explore north beyond the reservoir. The coal mine was the result of the other Zork team members specifically asking Bruce Daniels for “a particularly nasty section.” His response originally involved a huge maze similar to the other huge Zork maze which we’ll get to in my next post. The team decided that enough was enough, however, and edited it down to a fairly manageable four rooms. Tim Anderson nevertheless notes this as “a late example of making things hard by making them tedious.” Still, the coal mine we’re left with actually isn’t all that “nasty.” It has some tricky but manageable puzzles, as long as we aren’t stupid enough to carry an open flame — i.e., the torch — inside. One of the outcomes is a diamond. (In another choice Get Lamp interview, David Welbourn notes how every adventure-game coal mine always seems to contain a diamond; would that it were the same in real life.)

Discounting only the maze area to the west, we’ve now completely explored the underground and solved all of its puzzles but one. We still have the “LOUD ROOM” to deal with.

>D
LOUD ROOM
THIS IS A LARGE ROOM WITH A CEILING
WHICH CANNOT BE DETECTED FROM THE
GROUND. THERE IS A NARROW PASSAGE FROM
EAST TO WEST AND A STONE STAIRWAY
LEADING UPWARD. THE ROOM IS DEAFENINGLY
LOUD WITH AN UNDETERMINED RUSHING SOUND.
THE SOUND SEEMS TO REVERBERATE FROM ALL
OF THE WALLS, MAKING IT DIFFICULT EVEN
TO THINK.
ON THE GROUND IS A LARGE PLATINUM BAR.
>GET BAR
BAR BAR ...
>BAR BAR
BAR BAR ...
>GET BAR BAR
BAR BAR ...
>L
L L ...
>LOOK
LOOK LOOK ...

This room feels like something of a throwback to more primitive games whose two-word parsers and limited world models forced them to replace relatively sophisticated environmental puzzles with guess-the-word games. The Zork team had specifically wanted to avoid the pitfalls of the early parsers with their frustrating non-specificity. Blank, speaking of Adventure: “It really bothered us that if you said ‘Take bird’ it would put the bird in the cage for you–sort of doing things behind your back.” All of which makes this puzzle and its solution — “ECHO” — feel like the betrayal of an ideal of sorts.

But its frustrations are nothing compared to the maze, one of the largest and nastiest of its type in adventure-game history. We’ll tackle that monster, and finish up, next time.