Welcome to Just Adventure + — Part 39

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

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

By Erik Reckase

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.

Other Links of Interest

• The Interactive Fiction Archive: This mirrored German archive contains just about every free piece of interactive fiction known to exist. Just remember that with the good, there’s always the bad …
• The World of Interactive Fiction: Maintained by Suzanne Britton, who also writes her own IF games. Check out the fantastic “Best of IF” link on her front page, with links to high-quality adventures and the software to play them. Highly recommended.
• SPAG: The Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games: Maintained by Paul O’Brien and Joe DeRouen. This is a great interactive fiction webzine that comes out quarterly, with game reviews and excellent editorials.

There’s lots more out there–a simple search for “interactive fiction” on any of the major search engines will give you more links than you ever thought possible. If you have problems getting these games running, whether on your personal computer or on your Palm Pilot, drop me an email at [email protected], and I’ll try to help you out.

Next time, I’ll be discussing NetHack, the incredible sequel to Rogue (see Just ASCII +, Part 1), so stay tuned!