Zork Zero

In 1988, text adventures were on their way out. I was one year old, and had no idea what a computer was (a powerful machine capable of performing millions of calculations every second) or what it was for (playing games). Infocom, the early market leader in interactive fiction, had been acquired by Activision and was gradually ending its production of text-based games. Infocom's dying gasp, in a manner of speaking, was Zork Zero, a prequel to the legendary Zork games.

A ton of years later, Ashwin gave me a CD-ROM with all five Zork games and Planetfall, some of Infocom's most famous games. The games are low-tech from a modern perspective; actions are performed by typing commands at a prompt and the results of these commands come as text as well. "take the scroll" might bring about an output like "You now have the scroll." The trick to creating a text adventure that is not dreadfully boring is good writing. The genre is a mixture of humor, storyline, and puzzles. Zork Zero has all three. The puzzles are at times tantalizingly difficult, so there is an on-line hints system that provides enough information to get back onto the right track, but not too much.

In Zork Zero, there are rudimentary graphics and a decent mapping engine that keeps track of location. These additions to the normal text adventure interface add a great deal to the playability of the game.

The story is fairly simple; evil sorcerer Megaboz has placed a curse on the entire Great Underground Empire, and the player must free the Empire by recovering the 24 Flathead items, which are stashed all over the expansive game environment.

Of the interactive fiction I've played, Zork Zero is among the very best.