A Brief History of Zork
I know it really doesn’t have anything to do with Ultima, but I figured you might all want to be made aware — if you weren’t already — of Mental Floss’ recent article: Eaten by a Grue: A Brief History of Zork, by Rob Lammle.
And if reading the article gives you a hankering to pay a visit to the mystical land of Zork, don’t forget that Good Old Games has most (possibly all) of the series available for sale.
Return to Zork was epic the first time I played it. Going from old-school adventure games where it is just 2d pixelated sprites on the screen and opening up the game… woah…
Not sure how many of you played it back then, but it started with a black screen with writing on it saying something along the lines of “You are standing beside a white house.” (ala Zork games), then that faded out into a picture of a white house. It then zoomed around the side and looked in the mailbox (there were typed commands while this was happening on the screen, like someone was playing it; It was a FMV sequence), and an actual person’s face appeared and started actually talking. It was… woah. Then the camera ended up zooming over mountains and stuff with full orchestral music.
Damn CDs were a cool invention.
Return to Zork was the first in the series I ever saw, so I missed out on the magic of seeing what had previously been a text-only game suddenly transformed into a world of graphical wonder.
Though it was a gorgeous game, nonetheless.
I loved Infocom’s text adventures. Anyone who hasn’t laughed, cried, mapped, and screamed in frustration at “Planetfall” has missed one of the great experiences of gaming.
In addition to the Zork trilogy and Planetfall, I think their funnest games were “Hitchhiker’s Guide” and “Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It”
Although I played on the Apple II, for once I’d recommend playing the DOS versions rather than the original Apple ones. The games play exactly the same, but the text is formatted much better in DOS.
Return to Zork is an incredibly stupid game (although they did accurately replicate the nonsensical nature of some of the old text adventure puzzles)
Its two sequels were good, though.
I liked Return to Zork. Guess it is just my kind of stupid.
I never did get the Infocom games myself.. I had Sorcerer and Enchanter (never got to play the Zorks) but my only memory of them is me thinking ‘this game sucks!’ and being incredibly frustrated with them both hehe. To be fair i got both of them from a friend loooong after I was playing Ultima V and Bards Tale and whatnot so the old text games just didnt do anything for me..