Forget Square Pegs, playing Burger Time, re-watching V or even making references to old Gary Gygax manuals. If you want to be a TRUE retro 80s nerd, you should bust out your Radio Shack TRS-80 or your Commodore 64 or your Apple II+ and play Zork. It’s National Zork month (thanks to Rob Webber for alerting me to this). Wired has a good intro to Zork.
“Your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow.” Let’s get this GOING!
Edited to add: Eeep! You can play RIGHT NOW! Play Zork online.
P.S. “Zork” is a text-adventure. It’s a pre-cursor to games like “King’s Quest” and “Lesiure Suit Larry” in which you give commands to an avatar who tries to complete a quest for you. Except Zork has no graphics — there’s just descriptions of what you see and what your actions cause to happen. It’s called Interactive Fiction, but that term is almost as overwrought as “graphic novels.”
People still write text adventures and I still play them.
On my iTunes now:
Fantasize by Liz Phair from "Whitechocolatespaceegg"
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Jun 27th, 2007 at 11:19 am
I don’t have time to play Zork:
I’m too busy getting laid!
Jun 27th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Will said: ““Zork” is a text-adventure. It’s a pre-cursor to games like “King’s Quest” and “Lesiure Suit Larry” in which you give commands to an avatar who tries to complete a quest for you.”
Lesiure Suit Larry and Kings Quest are games that are rarely ever made anymore because people find them too simplistic.
Let me reiterate that.The games most like Zork are not made anymore. Let alone text adventure games.
Jun 27th, 2007 at 11:40 am
I love adventure games. I am deeply saddened that the genre has ceased to be.
Jun 27th, 2007 at 11:42 am
Actually, it’s not because they’re too simplistic… they fell out of favor because of the slow speed of them. Lots of puzzling out, no button mashing action. Anything that has adventure elements now is constantly interrupted by either RPG -style leveling up through battling or arcade-style “mini-games”
Also, Hines, I’m disappointed in your two examples being SIERRA. LucasArts made the better Adventure games, hands down.
Jun 27th, 2007 at 11:43 am
I’m still freaked out at how amazing Inform 7 is:
http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html
And I still really want to write something in it, in my generous amount of spare time.
Jun 27th, 2007 at 11:49 am
A whole month? Black history only gets a month (the shortest month to boot). So by transitive reasoning Zork is as important as Black History.
Jun 27th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
I wrote a few things in Inform 7. It’s an amazing experiment — but I’m not sure how different it is than regular programming. As I wrote my game, I was still looking up commands, seeing the proper syntax, trying to find existing examples — just as if I was writing it in PHP.
But if anyone should be trying to make a natural language programming language — it’s text adventure authors, since they have spent years building natural language parsers.
This comment brought to you by I Am Changing Into A Machine, Incorporated.
Jun 27th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Adventure games are still being made, everybody!
There’s a new Sherlock Holmes-meets-Cthulhu game which is supposedly pretty awesome.
And there are some Agatha Christie mystery games which are also good.
The above are graphical. But hell, MORE extremely good text adventures have been made in the last 10 years than were ever made in the ’80s. You just have to download them for free instead of paying $59.99 for them at Babbage’s.
Jun 27th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Also, Will, play Last Express already!
Jun 27th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
I assume you’ve played the “original” computer adventure game, commonly referred to as the “Colossal Cave” adventure? I think it was so frustrating to me that I didn’t get into adventure games as a result. RPGs? Sure. FPSs? Sure. But no Zork. I don’t know from Frobozz.
-Terry
Jun 27th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
It’s very nerdy of me to be happy that you linked to my friend Chris’s blog (Game Life).
Also, http://www.telltalegames.com/samandmax
TellTale games recently released brand new Sam and Max games, which are awesome point and click adventures that I totally love.
Jun 28th, 2007 at 9:16 am
I am a big fan of Castle of the Winds, I played that game for hours and hours. I miss RPG games, I lvoed em so much. Though I did get tired of them when there was 20 minute cinematic sequences
Jun 28th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Sherlock Holmes-meets-Cthulhu?
I can’t tell if I wet my pants or came in them or both.
Jun 28th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Terry… the original “Adventure” is incredibly frustrating. Even games as old as “Zork” (a direct descendant of Adventure, almost a kind of “special edition remake” of sorts) are significantly more interesting and easier to play than Adventure (not easier to win, just easier to interact with).
And the text games being made today are even more accessible than THAT. Don’t give up!
Jun 28th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
More Zork articles:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1499/the_history_of_zork.php
http://armchairarcade.com/neo/node/1383
-Terry
Jun 29th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Damn, I haven’t played text adventures…since college. Back then they weren’t retro, they were now-tro. Sigh.
Jul 11th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Hard game. I couldn’t get out of the forest. I’ll just stick to my Oregon Trail game.