Welcome to Just Adventure + — Part 39

January 1st, 2005 Erik Reckase Articles

Just ASCII + A Column Covering Interactive
Fiction and Other Nongraphical Adventure Games

Adventurer vs. Red Dragon
by Simon
de Vet
(click to enlarge)

Part
2–Zork, Palm Pilots, and Other Interactive Fiction

ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983 Infocom, Inc.
All rights reserved. ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc. Revision
88/Serial number 840726

West
of House

You are
standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There
is a small mailbox here.

>
open mailbox Opening the mailbox reveals a leaflet.

>
read leaflet (Taken) “WELCOME TO ZORK Zork is a game of adventure, danger, and
low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen
by mortals. No computer should be without one!”

Countless
thousands of gamers were introduced to adventure games with these words. I first
played Zork I back in 1981 on a TRS-80 and was immediately addicted to
the experience. My parents, recognizing my enthusiasm, bought me a Commodore 64
with a stubborn behemoth of a disk drive, and soon I was wandering through Zork
II, spending hours and hours glued to the screen in the basement of my house.
Over the next few years, I hooked up with a friend of mine and proceeded to play
almost all of the text adventures released by Infocom, becoming more and more
pale from lack of exposure to the sun.

About two years ago, I happened to
be walking through the hallowed discount aisles of CompUSA, when I happened upon
Activision’s rerelease of most of these games: Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces
of Infocom. At the time, my poor 486 DX2/66 was beginning to show its age,
and so I proceeded to reduce its stress level by playing a few of these non-processor-intensive
games. A few months later, I put it on my shelf in deference to some new games
that had been released and promptly forgot about it.

In the meantime, I
had gotten my wife hooked on the Zork series with Zork Nemesis and
Return to Zork, and I was disappointed to find out that Zork: Grand
Inquisitor would not work on my poor old Win 3.1 machine. It was only in the
early months of Y2K that I finally purchased a machine capable of dealing with
Windows 95 and began pursuing the elusive Grand Inquisitor. While visiting
Activision’s web site for information, I discovered that Zork I, II, and
III were now free as part of the publicity for Z:GI, and in addition,
a new, albeit short, text adventure (Zork: the Undiscovered Underground)
was also available!

As if this wasn’t enough excitement for me, I also discovered
that a number of interpreters had been written that allowed people who owned the
original games for the PC to play them on their Palm Pilots! The most popular
of these, Pilot-Frotz, has commonly used words and movement keys available through
on-screen pop-up menus. I shuffled through the mountains of old game CDs on my
shelf to find my copy of Masterpieces and with a few mouse clicks guaranteed
that I would never get any work done again.

Of course, you have to start
somewhere, so I decided to replay Zork I a final time to reassure myself
that I was still capable of a passable venture into the world of Zork. I
was amazed to discover how truly difficult the game continues to be, twenty years
after its conception. The text descriptions of locations and objects are adequate
in Zork I, but they definitely improve over the course of Infocom’s text
adventure dynasty. The mazes in are truly insidious–although once I figured out
how to solve them (basically by dropping different objects in each room as a sort
of trail of bread crumbs), it was an exercise in map organization. As far as the
rest of the game goes, some puzzles are pretty easy, some are fairly difficult,
and a few are so notoriously subtle that I actually had to look at a walkthrough
to remind me how to solve them. Zork I is wonderful in another aspect that
doesn’t get mentioned very often–puzzles do not necessarily have a single solution.
At least three of the puzzles in the game can be solved in multiple ways, with
some solutions much more complicated than others.

I’ll be presenting mini-reviews
of these classic text adventures over the next few months, beginning with the
pure text adventures in the Zork series. Once I’ve progressed through the
Infocom collection, I’ll present you with some of the best interactive fiction
that I can find on the ‘net–in the meantime, I present these links for your downloading
pleasure, in the hopes that I can inspire you to play one or more of these classics
again, for old times’ sake.

Free Zork Text Adventure Game Downloads

Infocom–a
memorial: This great site has download links for the three now-public
Zorks, as well as a link for The Undiscovered Underground. Win95,
DOS, and Mac versions are available. There’s also plenty of information on all
of the other games from Infocom here as well–indispensable as a reference.

Palm
Pilot Stuff

Pilot-Frotz
by Alien Hunter (Paul Margrave): This the best (and currently the
only) interpreter available for the Palm Pilot, and it’s totally free. The zip
file contains complete instructions on how to use Pilot-Frotz.
IFmapper
by Ingo Kessinger: This program allows you to draw maps on your Palm Pilot
for the games that you are playing using Pilot-Frotz. I haven’t done much with
this–it’s pretty buggy, but it shows some promise.