Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 117: Zork

Episode Date: September 18, 2017

Former Computer Gaming World boss Jeff Green joins Jeremy and Bob to explore the world of the Great Underground Empire, consider Zork's influence on gaming, and do their best not to be eaten by a Grue.

This week in Retronauts, you are standing in an open field west of a White House with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. Uh, open mailbox. Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet. Uh, 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. Command. Go ahead. We're still west of house. Okay. Enter house? I can't see how to get in from here.

We're west of house. Oh. Yeah. Go east. The door is boarded and you can't remove the boards. We've got to go around the house. I'm trying to think of how to put that in a cardinal direction. though.

Yeah, I think there's, let's see, if we just say, what if we just say, go north, what happens? North of House, you are facing the north side of a White House. There is no door here, and all the windows are boarded up. To the north, a narrow path winds through the trees. Oh boy, I say we don't take that yet. No, we shouldn't take the path yet. Is there just like a general look command that lets us know what's on the,

what's around us? You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all the windows are boarded up. The north, the narrow path winds through the trees. Could there be, I'm asking Jeff here, could there be a window maybe that is open on one side of the house? We need to go around that to one side of the house, but how do we do that? This is like east or west. Yeah, so we're facing, which way are we facing computer?

North of house, you are facing the north side of a white house. Okay. Should we go west? Sure. Yeah. west of house there is a small mailbox here oh that's what we oh yeah so um so i guess we have to go east and then go east again east should put us at the front door east the door is boarded and you can't remove the board yes so east again the door is boarded and you can't remove the boards oh shit no east would straight into the door

oh okay this is hard to do with that graph paper yeah i need to i need to draw the house uh so maybe West, then north? Yeah, let's try that. Forest. This is a forest with trees in all directions. To the east, there appears to be sunlight. You know what? We're not going to make it out of this alive. So I say we go into the forest.

What do you think? Sure, and just die. Yes. Well, I mean, we don't know if we'll be killed instantly. That's true. I feel like it probably will happen. All right. What's your command then? What was it the direction of the forest?

Is that north? You went west. Okay. Sunlights to the east. Is this hard to see when you don't actually have the text in this card? If we keep going west, is that into the forest then? I think so. We just went west last time.

Are you asking Jeremy or me? Both of you. See, it is hard. You did go west. So if we keep going west, we should be going into the forest. Let's go to the forest. Yeah, west. You would need a machete to go further west.

Oh, okay, it's blocked. All right, so we have to turn around. So east. Forest Path. This is a path winding through a dimly of the forest. the path heads north-south here. One particularly large tree with some low branches stands at the edge of the path.

Examine tree. There's nothing special about the tree. So was that path the path that we needed the machete for, or is that another path? I think this is a different path. This is a north-south path. Let's take this path, whatever direction that would be. North or South?

I'll let Jeff decide this one. Let's go north. clearing you are in a clearing with a forest surrounding you on all sides a path leads south on the ground is a pile of leaves i will say uh look look at pile there's nothing special about the pile of leaves oh come on maybe there's some kind of kick pile kicking the pile of leaves has no effect i feel like that pile is conspicuous right can you is there maybe another verb we could use can you pick it up like, yeah, pick up pile. In disturbing the pile of leaves, a grating is revealed. Ah, that's good. Also, taken, you've picked up the pile of leaves.

Excellent. I'll put that right in my pocket, and I will say open grating. I bet this will not work. Probably not. The grading is locked. I knew it. Yep, yep. We have to get in the house is the thing. Yeah.

We have to go back. There's got to be something to, like, some sort of crowbar situation or some something to remove. So there's a way to open a window. Yeah. Right, here's your update. Clearing. You are in a clearing with a forest surrounding you on all sides. A path leads south.

There is a grating securely fastened into the ground. Okay. So we're at a dead end in the forest with a grating on the ground, locked. So we need to head back south. We can't go any further. Right. South. Forest path.

South again. North of House. House. Okay. So now we have to just, no matter we walk around. the house. I'm having problems figuring that. I know. Okay, we're facing north. Right. You are facing the north

side of a White House. So you're actually not facing north. You're facing the north side of the White House. So you're facing south. We're facing south. There is no door here, and all the windows are boarded up. Man. To the north, a narrow path winds through the trees. And so go let's see, we went.

You've been west and east already. Right, we have. All right, so south then. Keep going south. Oh, the windows are all boarded. Examine window. There's nothing special about the boarded window. That's okay. Have we been around all sides of the house?

I think there was a description saying all the windows in the house are boarded up or something. Is that true? Is that true? Okay, yeah. So we've seen all four sides. I think we need to get away from the house. We're failing the first puzzle. Yes. We're not good. We're not doing a good job here. Maybe that's as far as we need to go with this.

Yes. We, we, we, we, I turn to my gamer's license right now. to the first ever Retronauts podcast, Let's Play. This is Radio Zork. That's right. Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and this is the latest episode

of Retronauts, an episode about Zork. And as you can see, you've gotten a wonderful experience of the game. You've gotten like the purest slice of Zork right there. I want you to pipe

in some epic James Horner music throughout that Let's Play or something like that. It's like every Monday decision has like a great orchestra string. Yeah, Orgers with Sting, rather. But Zork, Zorke is a classic, groundbreaking, influential, revolutionary text adventure, a game consisting entirely of text.

And we're going to talk about it this week. And to do so, we've called in a special guest, someone with an experience in classic PC games, possibly the PC games expert. Well, at least you ran a magazine about it. Yeah, those are two different things. Okay, all right. So why don't you introduce yourself, a special guest? Hello. I am Jeff Green. I used to be the editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming World Magazine, and that was many, many years ago. That was from 96 to 2008 that I worked at the magazine, 2000 to 2008 as EIC. So, yeah, it's been a – I was there a long time. But when I started in 96, I guess text adventures were already long gone.

At that point, they were made – MIST-in-voided them. That's right. Yeah, MIST killed them. But there were Zork graphic. adventures by then. Oh, yeah. That was bad ones. Yeah, Mnemesis and Grand Inquisitor. Yeah.

Return to Zork. Yeah, they went that route for a while. That wasn't Infocom, though. That was Activision. That's right. Yeah. Who bought them in 86, I think. It was a messy marriage.

It was a troubled, troubled time. But we're going to talk about the halcyon days before Activision came into the picture, maybe a little bit of Activision talk just because of, I don't know, we'll see how far we get into this episode, into the series. But I definitely want to talk about the original Zork. Wait, I'm Bob Mackey, by the way. And also the, like the original Zork trilogy. And to do that, yes, of course, I also have here.

I'm here. I'm Bob Mackey. And myself, Jeremy Parrish. Sorry, it was a kind of unconventional start to the podcast. Yeah, now I have no idea what I'm doing. I just feel bad that we couldn't get into the house. No, that's, I feel like that's the experience. though.

Like, Zork is not a game that you just powered through. Unless you had hints with you, but why would you do that? Why would you take a walkthrough with you? We did need graph paper. We're playing it on like extra hard mode, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Without the screen in front of us and without graph paper. Right.

Yeah, a text adventure, like, you want to see the text. It's kind of difficult without it. But I do think it is like, it's interesting that this one genre you could do as a podcast, let's play. And that makes it unique among anything we've ever talked about. I don't think we've ever talked about IF before, Interactive Fiction. No, and it's funny because I am, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about video game history, and I should be, I'm on this podcast a lot, but this is sort of my one blind spot. This is sort of the one thing I can't really get into even when I try to play interactive fiction.

I just, I just was born into an age where all games had graphics, and even though I read a lot of books, I just, I need more, I need something more to a game. And I realize I have a great respect for these games upon researching them, but it's just something that is really difficult for me to get into. Yeah, and that's fair. And for myself, like, I didn't, my family didn't have a proper computer capable of running these things until, I don't know, the early 90s, by which point they were dead. Yeah. But, you know, I was familiar with them because I had friends who owned the games and, like, you know, they would bring the feelys that came with Infocon games. You know, like, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I love the books.

So I was really envious of my friends who had. Hitchhiker's video game. It was like living the experience of Arthur Dent, but in a way, like a unique way, with new puzzles and story elements and jokes and things like that. And I always

wanted to get a slice of that world and experience it. So I actually like the... Nice. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this book that I brought in, the Zork Anthology manual. It's basically the manuals to the first five Zork games.

This came out as a compilation for Macintosh and PC in the early 90s, and I bought it back then. And this is, like, the oldest video game paraphernalia that I have, like, have owned continuously. That came with the collection? Yes. I love when PC games would come with giant books like that. It's not just the book. There's also, yeah, these maps.

And there's even something for Planet Fall, which is kind of hidden in here as a bonus game. Cool. So, yeah, like this. has maps of the Zork games. Like there's just, you know, they really cared. But it's cool that they'd had them. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, this was, this was published for a later generation of gamers who were like, where's the pictures? Yeah. Right. So, yeah, like this is the, the video game thing that I've had in my possession the longest that hasn't somehow passed out of my collection or been lost or been sold off or whatever.

So you played all these games? I haven't played. No, not in the day. But, you know, like in the 90s. I mean like – I played through some of them – like played – I've played all of them to some degree, but I've never actually finished one. And I have just – I need to sit down someday and just play through them. Yeah, they are. They are.

Like I put serious time into it in college and still was just like – Yeah, I think like once you're out of college, you probably will never have time to finish a tax adventure. I have to pay for a mortgage now. Right. I mean, they made that one in college, right? They were at MIT at the time. Yeah. And that's something we'll talk about too is kind of the origins of these.

What about yourself, Jeff? What's your experience with Zorke? Yeah. I mean, I... Well, at the time, I do remember them... I don't remember it coming out, but I do remember the first friend who had it. He had it for his Commodore 64. And another friend had it on Apple 2.

And I can't remember actually the release history. So I can't remember which one was first. Or maybe they were simultaneous. I played it for the first time with a friend on the Apple 2, or we tried to play it. Like you said, they're very hard. I think I finished it years later, but that was with the Inviso clues, you know. But what I do remember most was how completely engrossed we were at the time because at that time, there wasn't an alternative. You know, there weren't the graphic adventures to come that we knew were going to happen.

And so looking at that screen and solving these puzzles was like the height of entertainment, of computer entertainment for us at the time. And it was actually just amazing to us. I remember that the computer was talking back, that we could type in anything. The parser was so good. And the writers were so clever that they – it was like the precursor to LucasArts, right? They like anticipated the kind of things you would want to try and they had a joke ready for basically everything you tried or a sarcastic answer. Or even just like a general answer that was, you know, kind of kind of a little bit snarky.

A little snarky. And also I remember that like LucasArts, some of the written answers were oblique but actually had the answer in them. If you just like looked at the words later, like often I would do, I would get the, I would cheat and look at the walkthrough in Visiklu and then go back and just smack my head like it was right there. They told me, but you had to just think differently. Right. Yeah, like the cyclops puzzle in the first Zork, there are two ways to beat him. One is kind of like a normal way. But the other, you can say Odysseus.

Yeah. And of course, because Odysseus blinded the Cyclops and the Iliad, that terrifies him. He runs away. Like, you would never think to do that. But if you look at the description in the 80 character, you know, like the 80 character with version, the first letter of every line spells Odysseus. So if you notice that, you'll be like, oh. Right. So they did all kinds of little clever things like that.

And, you know, I think for people who like writing and like reading, there is something really, you know, potentially intoxicating and engrossing about these games. And you do have to be able to kind of let yourself go and be able to put aside the fact that there are no visuals. But the best of these games, and I really think the Zork games stand up there. Yes. the best of them are so vividly described and so presented in such an intriguing way like there's something here and you need to figure it out what's going on. Like it just kind of pulls you in and appeals to your desire to solve puzzles. Right.

There would be objects in every room or most rooms like we found with the great. You know, this like puzzles start presenting themselves and combination of items. And, you know, I have to say, you know, in terms of the vividness, I was thinking about this on my way over here today that in my mind, you know, that the underground empire is so vivid. Just kind of like Middle Earth was before the movies, right? Like I had a whole thing in my head. Yeah, I have like visions of what the flood control dam looks like in the control room and, you know, like what the Alice room looks like, what the White House looks like. Right. And, you know, I guess there are some official depictions of those things, like on that weird box art for the.

the original Zorke where you have like Tom Selleck and a helmet and he's like swinging a sword. It feels really kind of out of place. That's not how I visualize Zork. Right. It's very different than that. But the descriptions of the world of Zork are so evocative. It takes place in the ruins of this lost empire that exists underground. And it doesn't make any sense.

But one of the reasons it doesn't make any sense is because they, the kingdom, the great underground empire was ruled by a succession of increasingly inbred idiots called the Flatheads who like with each generation became stupider and made worse and worse decisions. And this is like something that kind of comes out through some of the flavor text as you explore the games. And then in the later games they actually let you kind of experience what life was like under the flatheads

and you sort of lived through the final days at the Great Underground Empire. I feel like there's a lot of, it's like Douglas Adams meets Lord of the Rings here in these games. This might predate Douglas Adams writing though, maybe. The Hitchhiker's Guide was in the late 70s, so it was actually happening. The radio series, I think, was 76 or 77, which is right when the implementers were creating the original dungeon, which became Zork. So I think it was something in the air.

And I think there's some Monty Python influence. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think that was like at the time that was around when Americans could first start watching Monty Python on PBS. So that kind of humor, you know, yeah, all the flathead stuff was, you know, was, you know, was, very goofy you know satire of monarchy

stuff yeah yeah and it all it's all like Zork is very much influenced by a whole lot of things happening at the same time Dungeons and Dragons

was a huge influence on this you would not play Zork and necessarily think D&D because of what D&D has become but they all come from the same place which is tabletop storytelling, tabletop adventures and role playing games

you know D&D started out like evolving from a war game but it became this sort of live storytelling experience that friends or frenemies could share together and you had the dungeon master sort of building these locations and filling them with monsters and traps

and treasures and things like that and then it was up to the people playing the quest, the campaign, to sort of figure out their way through this. Zork is very much about this. There is some limited combat element in the series. The first game has some randomized combat that doesn't work that well and then beyond Zork actually has a character-building system with statistics and character stats.

I just said that, like character leveling, which I did think is kind of a weird idea, but interesting, and it certainly was like a different approach to interactive fiction at the time. Yeah. But like this comes from the same place as wizardry and Ultima and D&D. And so this is kind of like the part of the RPG genre that was sort of lost a time, I think. and, you know, it's become something different at this point, but the roots are here. Right. You had an inventory, right?

You had puzzles, very RPG-like, and the puzzles were difficult. And in Zork, one in particular, I mean, from what I remember, I think they actually got easier as they went on because they got better at doing them. And also, they started being a little fairer, you know, like you may. mentioned the random encounters. And you never really had much in your inventory that would actually deal with these eggs. And are you going to talk about the thief? Oh, yeah.

Okay. You can't talk about Zork without talking about the thief. Okay. Well, we're talking about how this is a one version of the early digital RPG, and I was watching the movie Get Lamp, which everyone should watch if you're interested in this. But it's interesting to me how all of this spun out of cavers, people exploring caves. And I was, in GitLamp, the photos of people exploring these caves kind of made me sick. Just like people crawling through these tiny crevices in caves.

And I admire them in their bravery, but it all spun out of a guy trying to map out a cave digitally. All of this came out of that. And I found that, like, very interesting. Just like, this weird hobby that I've never heard of before is what started this kind of digital RPG in a way. Yeah. I mean, to really understand Zork, you need to understand colossal cave adventure, which is sort of the er-text adventure. which was created by a guy named William Crowther, who was a caver who loved exploring, you know, caves throughout America.

And basically, Colossal Cave Adventure started out as just an attempt to map through text. The mammoth caves, I think, in Missouri, somewhere. I think it's just like one specific cave. Yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah, it's mammoth cave. I can't remember exactly where it is. But that kind of evolved over time into something more game-like, where there were treasures and hazards.

and hazards and enemies to deal with. And so that became kind of like this thing that really became pervasive. And people who had access to computers in the 70s, which was mostly academicians, people, you know, kind of around that world, places like MIT, played it and became addicted. I've mentioned the series, the TV series, Halting Catch Fire before. Right. But there was a whole section of like the second season, I think,

where everyone in the startup game company that they were trying to create was hooked on playing adventure and it was a really great episode to watch because clearly the people who wrote the episode knew adventure and like they were throwing out some sort of obscure references and secrets and things like that

and ultimately you had someone I think solved the game by breaking into the code and cheating which is exactly what the people who created Zork did they couldn't get the last point and adventure, Colossal Cave Adventure, so they went into the code and they cheated to figure out the last thing they needed. My knowledge of this early era of this game is that Crowther, he made Colossal Cave and then someone else asked him to, if they could add the fantasy elements. So Colossal Came became Colossal Cave Adventure, which was just known as Adventure.

Is that how it went? Yes, absolutely. I mean, you know, a lot of these games existed in an academic environment, like I mentioned, shared mainframes. So there was a collaborative element to it, just like with Space War. You know, it started out as just like the simple shooter, but then people started adding the expensive planetarium module so you could get stars in the background. And it evolved sort of with a group effort, a collective effort. And Colossal Cave in Adventure was the same way. Zork was a little different because it was really put together by four people, and I stupidly forgot to write their name down.

Dave Lebling and Mark Blank and. Yeah. Sorry about that. I should have written that down. But it was basically four guys, MIT students, working in the computer in AI labs. And they were kind of hooked on adventure, colossal cave adventure,

and sort of did their own version of it, their own take of it, a better version with a better parser. And they kept their stuff kind of on lockdown so people couldn't fuss with a source code. Like they could borrow it, they could play it, they could put it on their own systems, but they couldn't actually break into the code.

And there's a great anecdote on the digital antiquarian, philfra.net, about how there was one person who actually, like, cracked into the code and did some rewriting. And at that point, they were like, you know what, you went to all this trouble to do that, so you can have it. That's funny. Yeah. He earned it. But, yeah, it was more of a, less of like an aimless kind of all hands collaboration and more like the specific creation of a group of creation of a group of friends at MIT. And from this group of friends emerged the company Infocom who, you know, went into, really they wanted to be business software. You know, games were considered frivolous in the late 70s and early 80s.

Just look at the fact that the Macintosh didn't originally have many games because they didn't want it to be seen as frivolous. I like in the PhilFree.net articles I was reading, Infocom came from an era of software development where it's like we need the blandest name possible so we can basically do whatever we want. We're not tied to any kind of specific products. Right. And it was kind of like, you know, like when you open a distillery now and you want to sell whiskey, but it takes a few years for it to age. So you put out vodka as your first product just to get it out the door and start building up some revenue. And that's what they did with the games.

They wanted to create, you know, like productive, mature software to be taken seriously. But they had Zork, so or Dungeon, if you want to call it that. That was the original code name that no one liked. And so they put that out as a game. They kind of repurposed it and reworked it, and that became a product, and that became what they were known for. Like, no one remembers Infocom for productivity software. They remember it for the amazing graphic or text adventures, sorry, IF, that they produced. And, in fact, they sold a lot.

I mean, it was quite successful. Yeah, I mean, you look at the numbers that it sold now and you're like, oh, wow. Right. Like 100,000 copies, what a flop. Yeah, for the time. A hundred thousand copies, were there 100,000 computers on the market? That's crazy. We see, I've seen the Zork boxes and doing research, but this was originally like one of those floppy disk and a plastic bag sort of deals, right?

Yes. That's how it first came out. I thought so. Yeah. Yeah, they added the feelies, the manuals and all that stuff with later releases. Right. Originally, it was a floppy desk and a bag, in a plastic bag. Yeah.

Like buying drugs or something. In a way, it kind of was. You start playing and you're hooked and you look and it's all of a sudden 5 a.m. and you're three days later and you haven't bathed and your friends don't like you anymore. All of your appliances are gone. There is a certain addictiveness to this.

But these games like Zork, especially, they really got into a lot of the things that made video games so interesting and different. Like you mentioned when we were doing the live play-through, it was really hard to do this without having a map in front of you. And like I've been doing a lot of just going back and mapping old video games again

just to kind of kick off the rust and do something that, I used to do when I was a kid. And it's been really fun. And this was one of the first games to really demand you do that. Like this and wizardry, which actually came along several years after Zork, you know, they were these complex, convoluted places. Zork actually was deliberately designed to defy map making a little bit.

Pretty much. Like there's sort of an incontinuity or incontinuousness. They're not incontinent. A discontinuity, that's it. a discontinuity between some of the directions. So the maps that you create are like very weird and you have to go back and erase a bunch. Later games would be a lot more, you know, logical in their arrangement. But like you really did need to make a map and make a note like, okay, this is where the house is and there's a great here.

And, you know, this is where you find the egg. And oh, I'm at the thief here. I wonder where I'll meet them next and so on and so forth. And sometimes there were multiple levels. You'd have to put up and down arrows to remind yourself that, you know, you, you, you went up here as opposed to, you know, I mean, you only have like a, you know, on a piece of graph paper that was very hard to, you know, to write down, especially if you, you know, didn't have any art skills.

But, I mean, it was, it is funny to think that when you wanted to play, you know, the most popular computer game at the time, you had to do it with graph paper, you know. I mean, it's sort of hard to convey that to people now that that's what it really involved. That was, you know, one of your tools. I guess auto mapping is what that eventually evolved. It's kind of great. This really high-tech for the time technology required paper and pen or pencil to make it work completely.

You needed those analog tools to make this digital thing happen in front of you and the way you wanted to. But, you know, that carried through even beyond into the graphical era adventure missed when it shipped, shipped with a notebook that was just designed for you to take notes in. I still got mine. Actually, I guess I've had that longer than I've had the infocom book. but yeah like that idea was still there for a long time and the Zork series actually sort of helped define the concept of auto mapping there was a there was a built-in auto map to a certain degree in beyond Zork that would show you like the current room you were in which direction the exits went what rooms were you know around you which

rooms were dark so on and so forth so you know that wasn't like a super persistent thing you could just open up and see the whole thing like you can with, you know, a Metroid game or something like that. But, you know, at the time, that was, that was like taking that graph paper and putting it into the game. So, yeah, so there's a lot of, a lot of things we take for granted in video games now started with Zork. And the game consisted just of text. Text, right. And a prompt. And the other thing they did was that unlike most games now, pretty much every game,

They didn't actually even really tell you what you were supposed to be doing. They just planted you west of that house and then you just had to go. In fact, I guess this is a minor spoiler for anybody who actually goes and plays it, but once you get in the house and you look around, you find a trophy case. And that is really the key to the whole thing because the whole game is like solving the puzzles and then the answer, well, once you solve it, you get something and you have to put it in a trophy case. They never tell you to do that. It just went very dark here from him.

That was scary. It was like being a text adventure. I think a grue was going to do this. That was another thing. There was dynamism to the game. You had elements that had limited time, like you would take torches and you had to be careful because if you were underground, it would go dark eventually. And once it became dark, like to kill you, there was a monster called a grue lurking

underground that would devour you after a certain number of turns of the darkness. But, you know, there were also different parts of the map had different states. They had different attributes. So there were areas that were underground where you had to worry about grus and where the thief could encounter you. And then you would go above ground and you didn't have to worry about the torch and you didn't have to worry about grues or the thieves. So, you know, kind of depending on where you were in the world, things worked differently. And it was all very sophisticated. I mean, again, the idea here was to take colossal cave adventure and to make it up.

more sophisticated, and the sort of root of that was the text parser, which, you know, when you look back on it now, it doesn't seem that remarkable. It's very simple. It's like, you know, noun verb or verb noun, pretty much, like, you know, verb direct object. That's pretty much it. But it's capable of kind of recognizing different forms of syntax and different ways to parse things and phrase things. and is pretty smart about it. And it also, as you mentioned earlier, Jeff, does a good job of creating the illusion of being smarter than it is by giving you funny prompts and unexpected responses and things like that. Yeah. The sheer amount of lines of dialogue or responses were just insane because it would take a while before he would start getting to the generic,

you know, there's nothing here. You know, they had a lot of custom answers for everything, you might try to do with every object in the game. Yeah, and if you tried to do something really stupid, it would kind of poke fun at you. It would tell you you were stupid. I think, was this the game where the rule of them was the implementers thought of everything or the designer thought of everything?

And, you know, just created the sense that every possibility was accounted for. Yeah, I feel like this is what kicked off the playful antagonism of adventure games until LucasArts and Ron Gilbert especially was just like, I don't like this part of adventure games. I wanted this to be more friendly to me and more supportive of experimenting. But I feel like this is what kicked off what Sierra would eventually pick up on, you know, that philosophy of game design. Well, I don't think, I don't think Zork was ever deliberately antagonistic. Like, I think there were a few cases where you could screw yourself out of solving the games.

But those happen less regularly than in Sierra games. I meant more like how it mocks you. It's just like... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, even that differs from game to game because, you know, the first two games were actually originally one game that had to be broken up because the game was so huge. It was too big to fit on standard microcomputers at the time. Then the third game was written by, you know, a subset of those writers. And then the fourth and fifth games were written by entirely different people who didn't have any direct connection to the original Zork implementers.

But they were, you know, within infocom. And they each had their own touch. That's one of the nice things about interactive fiction is that, you know, more so than possibly any other genre, because it is often just the work of one person or a very small group of people, you really get their personalities to kind of come through. You get like the autorship that is kind of harder to do when you have a much larger group of people. And because you are sort of having almost like a direct dialogue with them, you get to see their personalities. So, you know, someone like Dave Lebling was more into RPGs and kind of like antagonistic puzzles. Whereas Steve Moretsky, who wrote Beyond Zork, was not so much into those. Like, he liked the RPG stuff, but he was also really into the history of Zork.

And crap, who wrote Zork Zero? That was, yeah, okay, that was Steve Muretsky. Ryan Mori already wrote Beyond Zork. Steve Mertzky, was he the Hitchhiker's Guy? I think so. And Planet Fall, too. Yeah, the co-writer on those. He ended up writing Zork Zero, the prequel to Zork that sort of ended out the Infocom run on the games

because he was the biggest fan of Zork at Infocom. And the actual creators of the original games were kind of like, you're taking this way too seriously. But that passion for the world that they created really came through and allowed him to create what a lot of people consider it the best and most, you know, richly developed game in the Zork series. So, yeah, so each game has its own kind of personality and you really kind of have that direct connection with the authors. And more so than most games, you have authors with interactive fiction.

And, like, that all starts right here with Zork. So it's a really sort of monumental part of video gaming that I think has really sort of been, forgotten and left behind these days, but it's worth remembering, worth looking back at. Right. And I don't, it couldn't be called dungeon because TSR was threatening to sue over the word dungeon. But do we know what Zork means? It's a programming term or a computer term? Zorg was just a term that they made up. It was like Fubar basically. Yeah. Okay. I thought it was an existing term. Well, they used the word in their language, in their like parserling. Okay. It was like the Zork. Well, yeah. I mean, it was basically like when, you know, something was Zork, basically. And that is with the kind of the, kind of the. the term they just used as a replacement for dungeon and it stuck.

But, yeah, they created a, like their parser was called the ZIL, Zork, interpreter language. And what else was there? The Z engine. The Z engine was a real kind of technical marvel. It was a virtual machine that would allow them to port Zork and all their other subsequent text adventures to basically any computer. And that was really important because Zork started out. being developed for the PDP 10, I think, microcomputer, which was, you know, or not microcomputer, a mini, like, mainframe computer.

So that was pretty much as powerful a computer as you could get. And there weren't that many of them in the world. They were produced by digital equipment corporations, right? And these would just fill a room, right, with equipment? Yeah, like they were enormous and expensive. So it's like a, not a microphone. But they were, they were like shared resources for people. You know, that's the environment that Zork was created in.

But then when it came time to put those on. microcomputers that had, you know, like 8K of memory, what do you do when your game takes up a megabyte of space? Like, you know, floppy disks at the time were, what, 320K or something like that? Yeah, that sounds right. You know, like 5 and a quarter inch disks. You imagine these things had limited access. I'm doing a Doom episode.

Maybe you heard it already, maybe not. But reading about John Romero's background, like, he would ride his bike down to the university and play these games on their mainframe because you could not like rents. a massive supercomputer you couldn't like no one had it in their house you had to go to a university so yeah when I was a kid my father was working on his doctorate so this was like oh wow early 80s and he would go and spend I don't know countless hours using shared time resources on I think it was called Wilbert or Wilbur or something like that it was the big shared mainframe at Texas Tech University and he would just come home with these stacks of computer paper printouts of statistics and things like that that he would use to work on, I don't even know what his doctorate was about is something to do with education. So he would just like have these massive reams of printouts. And then when he was done with them, he'd give him to me and be like, here, go draw on the backside of this. And that's how I spend my time drawing as a kid was on the backside of computer printouts.

But yeah, he spent a lot of time working on that shared time system. And he had to wait like in a queue and, you know, reserve time in advance. So it was kind of a different world. But, you know, when you take something created for that environment, that massive computing environment, and put it onto a microcomputer that sits on your desktop, I mean, it's kind of hard to get across to people who are used to having a supercomputer in their pockets that they use to, you know, read Donald Trump tweets or whatever, like just how precious and rare computer resources were in the late. 70s and early 80s. They were expensive and you know you really had to to kind of work within the constraints of microcomputers at the time and that's kind of where Zork came from was the need to take this massive mainframe shared resource system game and put it on to diskettes that would fit into a computer and they stripped content out of the games and they simplified the language

and they still had to break the original Zork into two parts and then they had some content left over for Zork 3 but even after doing that there was the question of like okay we put this on Apple 2 but what if we want to put it on Trash 80

or put it on you know C64 or something so that's where the Z engine came in and it basically was kind of something that sat on the computer and interpreted their code their language and kind of created this

platform agnostic way for them to create a consistent system that would work with their interpreter and allow them to program and, you know, create the worlds that they were accustomed to doing without having to compromise too much and without having to spend a lot of time throwing resources at making something fit into the limitations of a separate system. Yeah. I mean, it's really hard to convey, again, just how revolutionary it was as a player, just as a person at home, to have. a machine that was talking back to you that was interacting with, you know, there really wasn't a precedent for that. You know, your typewriter didn't speak back to you. You know, there was nothing in your house that responded to you and then gave you more and they gave you puzzles.

I mean, even just the ability to be able to... Now our refrigerators do that. That's right, they do. Everything talks to us. They spy on us too. It's great. I can't get Alexa to shut up in my house. She keeps talking during TV shows.

But that you could even just, like, have this kind of entertainment. You can play on a thing that was talking back to you was such a novelty back then. So the fact that it was just text was, you know, that didn't matter. Just the fact that this existed at all was just wondrous. You know, the first consoles came fairly shortly around thereafter at the time. Yeah, I mean, you had consoles appearing in like 76, I think, was the fair child. But they kind of hit the mainstream at the end of the 70s, early 80s. Like 81 was sort of peak Atari.

Yeah. Right. And this was, you know, I think this was also the beginning of, you know, in terms of PC versus console gaming, you know, you had, and thank God that war doesn't really exist anymore. I think that died quite a while ago and now we're all multi-platform. Thanks God. There's still a little bit of it, but yeah, not too much. It's the holdouts. Yeah.

But, I mean, all you have to do to kind of. of get a sense of what the difference was back then was to look at adventure for Atari 2,600 versus Zork. Because both of those came from the same place. They were both a distillation of colossal cave adventure. But I mean, if you look at what adventure on Atari does, it's almost nothing. It's like this kind of small maze with just a handful of screens and a couple of items that you can pick up one at a time and relocate, and there's some dragons and a bat. A giant look. Yeah, you have like the, you have the bat as sort of. of the random spoiler element that

the thief serves in Zork. But the world of Zork is so much more richly realized. There's so much more data space for the game, for one thing, but it's an enormous sprawling world, like I think a hundred some odd rooms, like unique

different locations within the game, most of which have something in them to do. And then there's random elements that appear throughout. There are objects you can pick up and relocate in place. There are objects that you can use on each other. Like, it's just, it was so much deeper and more substantial a game than adventure for Atari. And of course, you know, Atari, they, that was a different experience.

It was meant to be a different experience. So you had like two different philosophies being explored. Right. You also had, you know, these incredibly, you know, intellectual MIT students, these brainiacs, who were basically making these games for each other. You know, they were trying to out, out clever each other with these puzzles. So, you know, they were made by and for. very smart people, which I'm not including myself.

Because, you know, when I played it and my friends played it, you know, we didn't solve half the puzzles because they were so obtuse. Yeah, I can't consider myself, you know, Infocom Minzo level. I've never finished one of these games. Yeah, they're very hard to. I find them interesting and I enjoy getting lost in them. And I love that interactive fiction is still a thing. Like, people are still writing.

Yes. And, you know, you kind of have to go looking for it, but it's out there. and people are creating new IF all the time, and some of it gets really detailed and intricate. Like, it's continued to advance and evolve. Yeah, I don't know if it's still, if you could still buy it, but for a while, for iOS, they had the entire Infocom collection.

I think they stopped updating it maybe, but I know I have it on my new iPad, so it did transfer over. I see that you linked, oh, sorry, Jeff. No, go ahead. I see that Jeremy linked to, you know, playables. Is this in the public domain or how does that work exactly? It's not really public domain, but Activision doesn't, they don't like really enforce copyright on it.

So this is at Archive.org. You know, it's part of the classic game collection that has a electronic, what is it called? The Digital Millennia Copyright Act, it has an exception. That's why you have so many of these games playable at Archive.org. So, yeah, it's like, you know, Jason Scott's project basically. to get all these games playable. And I don't know if the whole franchise is available, but definitely the original trilogy you can play at Archive.org.

And Activision has done a decent job of keeping these in publication and circulation. Like, you know, the collection that I bought in the 90s was one of them, but certainly not the only one. Also, I think it's Call of Duty black ops. I think it's Black Ops. It is, yes. Inside there, right. I can't believe that.

You can play all of Zork in a Call of Duty game. That's even better than Grady is showing up in the cutscenes to Blades of Steel. Actually, I didn't believe that I thought Wikipedia was playing a joke on me, so I had to go to YouTube and YouTube proved me wrong. It actually isn't the game. So that's surprising. At the same time, I will say, like, as great as Zork was, it did ultimately prove to be something of an albatross for Infocom. And, you know, they created their sort of reputation on text adventures. And they were very successful for a while. And I think, you know, that led to a certain degree of arrogance. And they were like, well, yeah, we do this.

We do text adventurers best, and we're the best at it, and we don't want to do graphics unless we can do those the best as well. Meanwhile, you had people like Sierra and Magnetic Scrolls being like, yeah, okay, people want graphics. We'll give them graphics. Yeah, Mystery House was 1980. So, like, as soon as they started making Zork, there was like a ticking time bomb on how long these games had to be relevant to a mainstream audience. I think once Kings Quest came out, that was pretty much for the text adventure. but they kept with it. And, you know, Zork 3, I think, was like 80.

No, beyond Zork was like the 87 or so, mid mid to late 80s. Yeah, that's late. And, yeah, like, it was kind of like, you know, wizardry four coming out and being basically the same technology as Wizardry 1 in the late 80s. Like, it was like you can understand why they stuck with that because that was the franchise, but it just didn't work out. And when the company finally did move to a graphical format with Zork Zero, it was just too little too late, and they didn't do it as well as everyone else did. And it just couldn't save the company's bacon. So they were picked up and by Activision and basically dismantled. And, you know, Activision did put together those FMV versions of the Zork series later.

Yeah, those probably don't stand up. I can't imagine. I do want to watch them now. Yeah, I mean, I saw those in, you know, when they were new and I was doing a lot of gaming on my Mac at that point, but I just couldn't bring myself to play them. I was like, I'll just pick up the text adventure collection because I just don't feel like, okay, I like John Cleese, but no. That feels like an overreaction. Like, you think Zork is dusty and old. We are on the bleeding edge of technology.

We have real actors and real video and you'll get bored of this. Yeah, I mean, I played missed. And I was like, the worst part of this game is actually the people talking to me. And I don't, I don't want more, like, I don't want a game. I don't want Zork to be about that. Yeah. Yeah, actually, ironically, Zork might be less dated than, say, Grand Inquisitor. Yeah, I'd be totally right.

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That was part of the problem with the graphing. You know, you, yeah. I think there's an egg in the tree. Yes. Yeah. With a latch. Right. See, it's crazy that we can remember.

Yep. So before we go on and actually start talking about the games, I want to read some letters from people because people have a lot of memories of Zork and maybe this one which is like 2,000 words I'm going to have to trim down a little bit. I'm talking about doctor's thesis.

What's going on here? I mean, this is a graphical event or text you're reading a comment. We get letters and written letters in the mail. We're going to read them to you now. So yeah, this is from Jacob Shaw. I hold the Zork, the whole series, an extremely high regard these days,

but back when I first played it, my experience was a mixed bag. Back in 1995, the Amiga 1200 was only a couple of years old, and I was doing almost all my gaming on that, with graphics and sound that put every other machine at the time to shame. He just finished Monkey Island 1, 2, Obitus, Goblins, and been trounced by Simon the Sorcerer, and he's looking for something new.

So he picked up Zork and was immediately disappointed. Where's the incredible sound and graphics? my beloved Miga is capable of that game about a goldfish secret agent did it. Why isn't that the normal thing to do? Nine-year-old me was pretty stupid. The disappointment continued, I'm not underground, there's no empire, just a house

that a kid me suspects, smells like old people and crushed dreams. Wow. I immediately set about seeing how far I can push the game and still do things, stealing stuff from the house, pulling up the rug, and opening the trapdoor only to be eaten by a grue. I had no idea just how much impact the line you were likely to be eaten by

a grue would have to nerdy pop culture so many years later, but it instantly grabbed me. Now there's a challenge, a monster I want to learn more about and beat. Now, this is a proper text adventure. Tables have turned and I'm no longer bored but engaged, determined to experiment and proceed to see all the amazing places on the map that was included.

My own maps were doodled, much like you would one do for your choose-your-own-adventure books, or Obitus. Soon my map is off the page. There's notes everywhere in doodles of what I thought a grew looked like, like the critters from the movies of the same name, as it turns out, because they terrified me. There were instructions to myself on how to fight the troll, and were to go after getting certain items.

Lists of things I tried, failed, and succeeded were kept in the back of a school book, and new sessions with Zork weren't always about making progress, but exploring the limits of the parser and the imagination of the writers. Nine-year-old me never did finish Zork, and it wasn't until over a decade later that I'd go back to it after learning that the Infocom Classics were available for free from their website. With far less time to spare and more determination to see the ending, I arm myself with a walkthrough and set out into the Great Underground Empire again.

Anyway, that's kind of a summary, but yeah, it's a great one. Yeah, I think that's the only time I've ever heard anyone in recorded history compare James Pond to Zork. I know that's what he was talking about. In a negative sense, too. Yeah, this is no James Pond, sir. I play James Pond. From Sean Clements. I was never into fantasy or D&D as a kid, but I always remember going to a friend's house and trying Zork, if only for typing in phrases to a computer to do things.

Really seemed like the computer was some sentient AI. I can't say I ever got really far without dying. but each session always had a sense of wonder of exploring some unknown world, not unlike reading a good book, and the responses to various queries were quite extensive for such a primitive game. Ryan Stevens says,

I once played a version of Zork that replaced typing with a list of verbs and nouns to click on. One was Odysseus, which sort of ruined a puzzle with Cyclops. Wait, so there was a version of Zork with a text parser? It was probably like someone probably hacked it. Yeah, I was going to ask.

I don't think InvoCom ever I don't think so. I didn't look at the versions of this game, but I was wondering if there was ever a graphical version created with the more traditional click-on-a-verb kind of thing. Like the scum engine? Yeah, yeah. If a fan did that or...

I mean, they must have since Ryan Stevens has played it that way. I could play that version. I never looked that up. I'd be curious to see how it worked. From Stephen Miskimmis. Miskimins. I don't know how to pronounce that.

Sorry. Despite being born long after the rise and fall of the text adventure, I became incredibly engrossed when I stumbled. upon a browser version of Zork sometime in the mid-2000s. Even though the game is entirely graphical, the image of the initial screen with the White House in the mailbox is burned into my brain. I remember a strong sense of apprehension and curiosity

about what would lie ahead in this innocuous seeming world. Although Zork isn't as punishing as many of its contemporaries, I was never able to complete it. I tried to draw out a map as it ascended further into the cavern, but at some point I messed up and got lost, wandering in circles. Actually, I think that was just the design of it. Don't feel bad, man. Yeah. Every few years I like to load up the game and spend a few minutes poking around the yard. One of these days, I'll make time to finally finish it. Here's one about Zork 2 from Chris Neal. Zork 2 was my first ever and to this date only exposure to the Zork games. It was at what was probably the adventure game Zenith when I played missed to completion and kept walking around after the end because I loved the landscapes. And when I tried to be the seventh guest as fast as possible for a new personal best. What I adored about the game, as with games from the same era,

was the fully committed FMV acting cheese. I knew these were kind of dumb stories and hackneyed actors, but that was the best part of the package, the package as well as the charm. So I don't think he's talking about Zork, too. I think he's talking about, yeah, like return to Zork. So John Cleese was in one of these games. You were saying, okay.

I didn't really go into the FMV games because I knew he wouldn't get to them. Was it a Grand Inquisitor that he was in? I think so, yeah. I think that was the one he was in. He seems like a Grand Inquisitor type. No one expects the Grand Inquisitor. From Britain Peel.

I discovered it Zork at an age when I was too young to fully grasp its puzzles and definitely wasn't mentally prepared to complete the adventure on my own, but I was fascinated by it anyway. Mist was the same way. One of the times I remember playing it most, weirdly, was in the back of my dad's four-door truck. We were on a family road trip driving somewhere several hours away, and he had recently gotten a laptop on which he said I could use during the trip. being an early laptop, though, it couldn't run much except Solitaire and Word,

so I wasn't going to be able to play dissent on the road. Zork, though, ran fine, and it kept me busy enough not to ask, are we there yet? Later, I excitedly found a copy of Return to Zork at my local half-priced books, but it was only the CD inside a jewel case, so I got up to the point where Mavis Peepers asked me the first copy protection question, and there was no way for me to progress past that point. It was a very disappointing moment of my childhood. That same bookstore is where I later found the Zork Choose Your Own Adventures book,

though. So it wasn't all bad. And I think there was just one more Zork letter. Oh yes. Just came in this morning. From Joseph Panfile. Hello, I'm sending this in response to your listener mail call for the upcoming Zork episode of Retronauts.

While I have not played the games, I recently read the Zork Chronicles, a novel adaptation of the first game by George Alec Effinger. I have not heard of this. It was published in 1990 and stands as a bizarre piece of gaming history. It frequently references Joseph Campbell's work on mythology

and even alludes to Watergate with the one character asking of a suspicious figure, what did he know and when did he know it? Perhaps most interesting to me was that one of the promotional blurbs on the back of the book was written by George R.R. Martin, who of course has had quite the career since then.

Oh, yeah. And actually, I discovered just a few days ago that George R.R. Martin's first published work was a letter to Marvel Comics in an episode or an issue of, I think, X-Men in the 60s or Fantastic Four. It was one of those. It was like way a long time ago.

He was just a kid. Was it a cranky fan letter? He actually, he didn't write the first no prize letter, but he did write the first letter where they consolidated what a no prize was, where it's like if you can explain away the inconsistency for the Marvel editorial bullpen, then you win a no prize. He started that. That's a crazy little detail I found from... I can't even remember what site it was.

It's a site that does like this, you know, comic book trivia every week. Anyway, so those were letters, kind of a broad spectrum of opinions, but not a lot about the later Zork games. It seems to mostly be about the early Zork games, and I admit that's what I know best, too. I think most of us probably it's the same. I liked what I think was in the first letter that the person who said that when they went back and played it, they played it with a walkthrough. And I think that is actually a good way to treat those games now. Like, if you want to just experience it, you could sit down with a walkthrough and let

yourself be challenged. But, you know, at the point where you're just stuck rather than put it down and never play it, I would just cheat. Right. This is how I would do it now, in fact, just to be able to get through it, you know. Because just the experience of it, I think, is worth it, even if you can't solve all the puzzles by yourself. Yeah.

I feel it's fair with any adventure game of this vintage where it was designed. for you to smash your face against it over and over. But in that area, you did not have 200 streaming shows and a million free games on your phone. So it was like, I can distract myself with this endlessly. I don't mind being frustrated, but I feel like getting over that frustration is much harder these days. Yeah, and I can see this appealing to people, you know, on a certain level, like a certain type of person who could still get into the concept of IF. But yeah, I admit that, like I said, I've never finished one of the Zork games. And it is because eventually I get to a point where I'm just like, what the hell?

And I just don't have time to, you know, like I might have circa 1981 to, you know, keep coming back to this for weeks at a time. Well, it's a lot of typing. I mean, you have to do a lot of backtracking. You know, there's a lot. I mean, you know, it's involved. It is. But rewarding in its own way. So I'd like to go just kind of through the games, the first five games, at least, the Infocom games, sort of one by one, and talk about the most interesting things about them.

We've touched on a lot of these things like the original Zork Zork 1 released in I think 1981 for various computers and then kept in circulation basically infinitely from there a huge selling game

like it put Infocom on the map and basically set the company's destiny both for good and bad it was only half the game that they originally designed and they kind of hacked up Zork 1 from the PDP to fit it into a microcomputer

stripped out a lot of the content shuffled things around but basically once you get to a certain point you go through a door and that's where they sort of slam the door behind you and in the original version

of the mainframe version you could still go back past that point and in fact I think you had to go back to the beginning of the game to get like a rug or something but obviously that wasn't that was not kept for for the home releases.

But you can still play, if you look around, you can find the original mainframe version of Zork. If you want to play like the original vision of the game. And there are things about it that supposedly are more interesting and also things about it that are a lot more frustrating. Because, you know, there was a refinement that happened as they brought this game over. And it was designed for super geniuses to play, not for anyone with a computer. Yes, it was made for MIT, AI lab graduates.

Exactly. In an era where hardly anyone was even interested in computer science. So, yeah, basically, like, if you can send rockets into space, then cool. Yeah, you're intelligent enough. But everyone else you might want to play the commercial releases with some Inviso clues. Finishing Zork was a prerequisite at MIT for a while. You needed to do that to get your degree. Have we described the Invisa Clues, how that worked?

We haven't. You want to talk about that? Sure. I mean, it was a hint book. It didn't actually come with the original. I forget when they started boxing it in. I mean, probably at the time of the other Feelys, right? I want to say the first game with Feelys was Deadline, which came out around the same time as Zork 3.

Okay. So, yeah, I think that was when they started doing the Feelys. And that was done specifically for Deadline, and it was so popular that they were like, let's do it with all our games. And so they did reissue some of their games. That's right. And, you know, then subsequent games had Feelys like Hitchhackers Got to the Galaxy, came with all kinds of sorts. stuff and also no T. Yeah.

Very important plot point right there, the fact that it did not come with T. Yes. So the way the Invisikluse worked was it was actually very clever. I mean, I think it would still work to this day probably as a way to not actually ruin things for you. Basically, it was a hint book and it would pose, you know, how do I get into the house, would be a typical one. And there would be three blank lines there.

And it came with a special highlighter that you would run over the line to reveal the answer. And the answer's got – the first one was just oblique. It was like a hint. The second one was a little more direct. And then the third one would just tell you you got to crawl through the window. Interesting. I have seen that integrated into modern adventure games. I can't think of one offhand, but I know it's happened where it's like there is a hint system

and there are three hints per puzzle. The one hint is like, have you checked over here? And then it eventually leads you to the answer. If you just want the answer, you click on it twice and you get the most direct hint. Yeah. So it was just a really clever way of not having you spoil it for yourself. It was always hard to not want to do the next one down because the first one was usually fairly useless. It was just like slightly less oblique than the puzzle itself.

Actually, I think the second one was normally where I would try to stop just to prompt my brain into thinking. Yeah, and then, of course, I think there was also the hint line, like so many games back then. I think you could call, you know, a 900 number. The game counselors would take your call. Yeah. Yeah, and then later games actually came with a hint system built in, and some people feel this was good, and some people feel that this kind of made the developers a little lazy. They were like, well, we don't have to work as hard because people can just get the clues.

We don't have to make our puzzles as logical or intuitive as they had been, which, you know, if you've played the original Zork, then calling those intuitive and logical sometimes can be a little bit of a stretch. It's a certain sort of twisted video game logic where things do make sense, but you have to stop thinking, like, you know, in actual terms of how things relate in the real world. You have to kind of put yourself into sort of a childish naivete, I think, to be able to handle some of these. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you'll have... So, it's, yeah, it's kind of a weird combination. Like, these are games for extremely smart people, but it sometimes asks them to be sort of stupid.

Yeah, to use the logic the game is trying to communicate, not actual logic. Yeah, so, I mean, there are definitely issues with Zork and with all of its progeny. But, you know, again, you kind of have to take that in the context of the time. Like, there was nothing else like this in the world. It was kind of miraculous that you... You could have an adventure like this and go on a quest and have the computer tell you, you know, like what you're doing and define your adventure for you.

Yeah, and respond to you and respond to you in a way that felt unique or, you know, you would think of something and you would, you know, like the person was saying, you know, trying to, trying to break it or trying to, you know, find everything that you could do. And usually you could do those things that you tried. I mean, it was really robust in its ability to respond to whatever random thing you might type in. So one thing that I really like about Zork, I kind of touched on this a little bit before, but the way its world is designed is very much kind of what you see in Metroidvania games or something like Dark Souls, where you explore and as you acquire new items you can explore further. It opens up like those are the keys to exploring further, like finding, an inflatable raft or going through a door like the grate that was locked before.

You come through it the other direction. Now you have a shortcut. Things like that are, you know, really, that was probably the first time these ideas had been put into a video game. And now they're so common. They're just like people want that in their games. They expect it. It's a great point. I really never even saw the through line from like Zorik to Dark Souls, but it's very true.

I can't remember if the people behind. people behind Zork, were they D&D players too? Yes, absolutely. I thought so. I just wanted to make sure because I'm sure their campaigns didn't involve things like that. Probably so. That's sort of Metroidvania-ish system of unlocking things and backtracking and things like that. Right.

And I think, you know, it works better in video game format because you do have a more rigidly defined system. Like once you make a video game, unless it's procedurally generated, you kind of lock it down and set it. So it's more deliberately structured. and you have to produce things in a way that will sort of, you know, create friction with the player so that they can't just blast through it. So it does make, you know, the sort of progression and being able to backtrack in an interesting and progressive sort of way more appealing. So, yeah, you definitely see that here. And, you know, I was very fortunate and was able to interview Dave Lebling a few years ago with Jazz Rignell after his GDC presentation. I want to say 2014.

There's a really lengthy interview that we conducted up at usgamer.net. Just look up U.S. Gamer, leveling, parish, Rignal, or some combination of those words. And like he's very kind of humble about the importance of the game that he created. But I think he does recognize like, yeah, there are a lot of firsts in this game. So he clearly has some pride in what he accomplished, but doesn't want to tut his own horn too much. And he's totally out of it. of gaming now, right? He's...

Yes, he's like just... I think runs like a programming company or something like that. But, yeah, he doesn't make games anymore. He'd walk down the street and see him and not have any idea that this guy was, you know, so important to video game history. Right. Yeah, I think Crowther, is he sort of a mystery, too? I know in that the Gitlamp movie, he declined to be interviewed for the movie.

That's basically about the thing he made, helped make. Yeah, I mean, he's pretty old at this point, so he's probably just like, I'm not interested in any of that. Yeah, I just didn't know if he was still attached to gaming in any way. I don't think so. I don't think he ever really was attached to gaming. Yeah, yeah. You know, Colossop Cave was kind of an exercise more than the product. Just like, it'd be fun to map this cave I like in a computer, yeah.

Yeah, I think Steve Moretsky is one of the guys who went on to have a, you know, prodigious career, you know, way after Ted's adventures. Mm-hmm. So there's a lot of, just kind of fun elements of Zork, that really stick with you. I know you mentioned the thief earlier and that is one of the most I think

intriguing elements of the game because there's so much that happens around the thief. It's really kind of the only other human character in the game and the way you interact with him can be a little unpredictable

and surprising. Like he's antagonistic but not unfriendly if that makes sense. He's like a kind of reminds me of you know, dread pirate Roberts in the Princess Bride.

Like when he's going after Princess Buttercup, he's like kicking everyone's ass, but he's really nice about it. He's just doing his job, right? Yeah, except he, you know, but that was one of the rogue elements of Zork 1 that made it so difficult at times was that he was a thief

and he would just take stuff from you. He would take stuff right out of your inventory or he would take stuff if you dropped it on the ground because you would have to leave things to pick up other things. He would take them. So you constantly had this threat that the thief was going to take your stuff. Yeah, he would show up almost without warning.

Yes. Like you'd be exploring and all of a sudden you'd get the normal description for a room. But you'd also get the description that a thief was kind of standing casually against the wall and like wave farewells he took off. And then later you realized, oh, he robbed me blind. He took something. But you did have a little bit of warning because one of the things that you have, acquired fairly early is the

Elven sword. And the Elven sword, you know, in classic Lord of the Ring style, glows slightly when danger is nearby and glows brightly when you're close to danger. So like when you encounter the Cyclops, you know, it's going to glow. But, you know, you could kind of get a warning that the thief was nearby because the sword

would glow slightly. So there was this a little bit of a warning if you were paying attention to that. True. That was your sign to save. That was an early game where save early and often was was very important. But the thief, you know, he could have just been this nuisance, but he had more to the game,

like he had more of a part to play in the game than that. For one, this was one of the places where randomized combat came into play. Like, you could fight the thief either with the sword or with the wicked-looking knife. Was the wicked-looking knife what you got from him? I can't remember. It's been a while. Like, he has a blade. I think he has like a stiletto blade, basically.

And then there's a knife that you can also find. But the further you get into the game, and the more you discover, the higher your score gets, and the higher your score, the better luck you'll have against the thief. So you can fight him right away the first time you meet him, but you'll probably die. So if you wait until late in the game,

then you can defeat him. But, you know, the kind of risk reward there is that if you wait until late in the game, then he's going to be vexing you the entire time and stealing stuff and making a mess of, like, you know, the breadcrumbs that you're leaving behind you. So you have to watch out for that. But you don't want to kill him before he solves his essential purpose.

You can't get the perfect score in the game, which is really the point of Zork, without having him find the Faberge egg, the clockwork egg and unlock it for you. And then there's a treasure inside of that, like a little bobble or something, a jewel. Did we talk about the overall objective of Zork? You're just getting points. I mean, you're supposed to find 20 treasures. Yeah, you're getting the treasures and you're putting them in the cabinet. Yeah. But, yeah, you're getting points for everything.

You do those. Right, right. And you'd see that in, like, Sierra would borrow that, too. Like, their games would have points in them. But, so, like, once I haven't played enough of his work to actually get a treasure, once, can you put it in the cabinet? It's safe after that, or? I don't think the thief, yeah, because the treasure cabinet is in the house, which is not part of the underground. It's above.

Right. So, yeah, you would go back up, leave it in the cabinet. Once it was there, it was in. And is there like a fail state outside of getting killed? I'm just, I'm wondering, like, once you've achieved the maximum amount of tragedies you can with what you've done and what you've locked yourself out of, will the game end? No, there's a, like, there's a passage you have to go through it. Okay. And that takes you basically to Zork, too.

Got it. But, yeah, I don't know that, like, you can lock yourself out of getting a perfect score. If you, like, if you kill the thief before he unlocks the egg, then you won't get a perfect score. But you don't have to have a perfect score to go on. It's just a matter of like, hey, you beat the game, and here's how many points you scored out of how many points possible. And different versions of the game have different potential scores. I think, like, the original version of Zork had 600-something points,

whereas later versions had, you know, far fewer points because they chopped the game and a half. Right. I don't remember obsessing about the point so much. It was more about just being excited about solving a point. Yeah, I really think the points were for people, you know, back in the day who played the game and then were like, oh, I can do better. Yeah, you know, I want to solve this game in its entirety. I want to figure everything out. Proto leaderboards, actually paper printed out.

Yeah, and there's definitely, like, there was a community for sure of people connected by BBSs and whatever who were really a whole Earth electronic link or whatever, who were like super into, you know, sharing info about the game. and there's still fan sites that have, you know, the entire game mapped and continue to track bugs and things like that and document all the different versions of the games and so forth. So, you know, this is definitely a game that inspired a really hardcore dedicated fan base. And understandably so. There's just, there's a lot unique about the game. You know, we talked about the grues earlier, the thief, the Cyclops. Yeah, like, it kind of plays for.

fast and loose with setting because it does take place in the ruins of an underground empire. It's kind of a fantasy game, but then you have stuff like an inflatable raft. You have, in the second game, there's a hot air balloon. So, it's not really sticking to, like, medieval

fantasy. It's kind of all over the place. It could take place in the modern day, and you've stumbled on to, you know, the flood control dam, which has, like, a computerized control panel. So, yeah. So, yeah, it's very anachronistic, and that's what makes it interesting. They kind of just said, you know, whatever.

Yeah, I always took it as that it was said in modern times and you're seeing, yeah. But right, the computer, this wasn't, you couldn't really, you know, spend a whole lot of time thinking about this or taking it seriously. I mean, they clearly were not taking it seriously. They were taking the puzzle seriously and the whole experience. But I think the world building was, you know, as we said, it was very Monty Python-esque and kind of goofy. Yeah, they weren't thinking about how every item in Zork would have a wiki entry, you know, 30 years later. And then when Steve Muretsky tried to do that, they made fun of them. So the second half of Zork was broken into a separate game, Zork 2. And unlike the first Zork, there is more of a concrete goal to this, which is like the game kind of naturally broke into two halves

because the first part of the game is really just finding treasures and getting to the second half of the game. Whereas the second game, there is an objective that becomes pretty clear early on. Instead of the thief, now you have the wizard of Frobos, who just appears randomly throughout the maze as you're exploring and casts spells on you. Sometimes his spells fail, and he gets discouraged and walks off in a puff of smoke. But otherwise, he'll cast a spell on you and it'll do something to you. Every spell starts with a letter F, and every spell has a different effect. Like Floress causes you to glow.

float causes you to float. Ferment causes you to become drunk and you go, like, when you type a direction, you go the wrong direction. Do these stack? Do you get multiple things? I don't think they're pretty temporary and he doesn't appear often enough for them to stack. But, you know, his presence kind of gives you an incentive. Like, here's this jerk who keeps screwing you over and messing you up so you want to stick it to him. But if you die in the game, you're brought back to life without having to type restore by.

some sort of shadowy demonic figure and then you start to get a sense of like there's more to the game. So I'm going to go ahead and spoil this 35 year old game. Go for it. Ultimately, what you're trying to do is defeat the Wizard of Frobas by making a pact with the demon

that he has captured and the demon is like basically saying please, you know, break the hold that the wizard has over me. So once that happens then you gain the wizard's his magic staff and can cast spells yourself, there's only one of them that actually works for you, but you need it to get to the end of the game and go on to Zork 3. So this game definitely has a more concrete

purpose. It also has some very, very, I think people consider it sort of the weakest puzzles in the series, definitely the most frustrating. Some weird puzzles based on what I've seen here. Yeah. One of them is based on baseball, and it's very oblique. And for one thing, it doesn't orient you, so you don't know which part of the maze is supposed to be home base, but you have to like round the bases and sort of stumble your way through. But, you know, the other problem is if you're not American or Japanese, you're probably going to be like, what the hell is this? You might not recognize a baseball diamond. So it kind of, you know, creates a cultural barrier that they tried to avoid in future games. And there's a stuff based on Alice in Wonderland,

which is, I think, you know, kind of a common, go-to touchstone for adventure game designers because it does have that sort of loopy childlike logic and illogic that works so well in these games. And, you know, Lewis Carroll came up with so many, like, his books are basically a girl traveling through her own puzzle game, her own life. Yeah, I can see that. Let's see what else.

There's a robot that you can control. Again, like just playing fast and loose with setting, you know, it's, you've got swords and treasures and thieves and also a robot. and a flood control dam, but you can give the robot directions and it'll like travel around for you. Let's see, you have to break into a bank and steal stuff.

So yeah, it does a lot. It's crazy to think that this and Zork 1 were all part of the same game. Like this is a massive creation. But I guess that's what do you have happen when you have a bunch of nerds working together to try to one up each other. Right.

And this was the, version on the console computer. I'm sorry, I forget the term, the microcomputers? The big room filling computers. Oh, the mainframe. This is the one on the mainframe, right, that they split in half. Yes. But I'm sure they tweaked and tailored the two different

habs and stuff. Yeah, yeah. They had to make it standalone. But pretty much all the content in Zork 2 had appeared in the PDP version. Okay. So, yeah. It wasn't until Zork 3 that you got a new game. It's not entirely new. There were like a couple of puzzles in the end game.

were taken from the original Zork. But Zork 3 definitely had, I think, probably the most intriguing premise. And it's, again, not like the story, the purpose is not explicitly told to you, but it comes closer than any other game. Basically, you meet a figure, a shadowy figure who's like, come find me. So then your challenge is to come find him. And again, I'm going to spoil this. but the person who tells you to find him is the dungeon master

like the guy who's been behind all of this and the ultimate purpose of Zork 3 is to pass the test that the dungeon master is set for you so that you can replace the dungeon master and so throughout the game you're encountering figures who are the dungeon master like disguised as you

and you acquire the accoutrements that the dungeon master wears and uses and gradually sort of take on his form for yourself and you pass all of his puzzles and he's like congratulations you've taken over I can go away now and the game ends with you like saying I've got all these powers

now I can't wait to see what I can do and that's the end of the trilogy brand in Game of Thrones a little bit yeah kind of I'm trying to think if there's another another kind of pop culture instance of something like this

happening where basically you become yourself almost the pupil become the master. It's like the police. You know, listening to you talk about the trilogy there and how it ends up just reinforces just like how deep the world building and the story was. You know, there were so many other contemporary adventure games, text and graphic, that

also had good stories, but often they were more simplistic or they were more narrow in scope or it was just in one house. You know, here, and I think that's why in my mind it feels like Middle Earth, you know, that it was this, it was this whole kingdom with this, you know, and like you said, the more you examine things, you know, the more the more backstory you could get. And then the Phillies had like written histories, first person perspectives from some old emperor, you know, of the kingdom. Yeah, and I don't think it – unlike Tolkien, they didn't sit down. and meticulously plan all of this out. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

But they just kind of stumbled into it and created an evocative universe anyway. Right. Yeah, I should say it doesn't all make sense. And I don't think it's supposed to. And there's a lot of randomness in there. I do like the improvisational nature of this sort of design where there were no expectations from the audience. They just wanted a fun thing to play. So you get all of these anachronistic things.

Like, if you could think about what if the new mass effect, you open a door and there was a medieval kingdom behind it, people would get mad. Right, they get mad. They return their game and probably send people nasty tweets. If you create a mass effect game, people are going to get mad. That's true. Number one, there's no stopping that. But the thing that I find interesting about Zork 3 is that it was the first game to be made sort of as a reaction to the first two Zork games. So it kind of builds on what had come before.

And because it is almost entirely new content, it really plays off of those expectations that people had developed from the first two games. and also kind of the sort of jokes and things like that that appeared throughout the games. Like one of the little hidden jokes in Zork is that if you say hello sailor, the parser will say back to you, hello yourself. And supposedly it's like I think you can also read that it's a cursed word or something like that. But there is like a puzzle, an optional puzzle where if you stand at a lakeshore long enough, a boat will appear with a sailor on it. And if you say hello sailor, he's like, oh, thank you. I've been waiting for someone to break the curse on me by saying those words. So it's just like a little bit of a payoff for long-time fans.

You don't have to solve that puzzle to beat the game. It's optional. It's like an alternate solution for another puzzle. But it's there. Let's see. It kind of plays off some puzzles that appeared in the previous games, like a dragon reflection puzzle. And in Zork 2, you have to trick a dragon into attacking a reflection

of itself in an iceberg or a glacier and it causes the glacier to melt and floods the dragon and kills it. But here you have to use a mirror to sneak past guardians who are facing each other and can't recognize their reflection

as not being the other guardian. So by sneaking inside of this mirrored box then you can slip past the guardians to the end of the game. Zork 2, you get grue repellent, but you never have the chance to use it. So Zork 3 allows you to use grue repellent. And then there's like some really crazy stuff. Like there's a time travel puzzle where you have to like travel through time in order to steal a jewel by putting it like under the seat cushion in the time machine.

And it does the H.G. Wells thing where the time machine like is a physical presence throughout time. So if you if you just put, you know, the treasures inside the time machine, someone will find them and put them back where they belong. But if you hide it in the time machine, then it'll stay there into the future. I like that Zork 3 makes a joke of the scoring system and the first game you can you know the original game you could earn like 600 points Zork 3 has seven points to earn and they are handed out for no logical reason

like you can have all seven points and still not be anywhere near the end of the game let's see the robot returns and this time wanders around the dungeon like resetting things that you leave around so it's kind of like the thief, but in a, like, not a, not a, not a malicious way.

It's more like, oh, you've left the dungeon untidy. I need to clean up after you. That sounds infuriating, though. A little bit, yeah. But, yeah, it's not like, it's not like a malicious way. Yeah, the thief didn't mean well. Right. It's right.

And then there's, there's a character that kind of follows you around through the dungeon, almost like nemesis from Resident Evil. But the character is you. It's a shadowy version, and you have to defeat him, but not. kill him, and that will show that you have compassion, which is a key to becoming the dungeon master. So it's like Final Fantasy 4 meets Zelda 2. And a little bit of Ultima 4

in there also. Wow. So, yeah, there's really a lot to this. And, you know, we're kind of pretty much out of time now, and we've only gotten through the original Zork trilogy. So maybe someday we'll come back and do some of the later Zork games. But I kind of feel like you know, we've talked about

the general reasons this series is so important and you know, kind of the important evolution of the series. Everything beyond here was kind of a reaction and an attempt to make interactive fiction still work in a changing world. But right here, the Zork trilogy,

that's when these games were king, and no one did this better than Infocom. And if you really want to see a genre in its peak form, the Zork trilogy, the original Zork trilogy, is right there. And Infocom intended for Zork to go beyond

just the trilogy and Zork 3 even includes a teaser for Zork 4 like in the time travel machine or something there's a room where you can go in and like you'll see a scene from Zork 4 but that game never happened instead they started a new trilogy

where they took the magic idea of Zork 2 and said what if we built an entire game around this and that became enchanter and what else is it spellbound and something I can't remember the name of it but those are like set in the Zork universe In fact, you even meet, like, the adventurer that you play in Zork in one of the games, and he's always, like, trying to take stuff from you and asking you questions and just kind of being a doofus.

Like, when you play a graphical adventure game, you're kind of a doofus. Yeah, yeah. You're doing stupid things and killing yourself. You're a destructive idiot. Yeah. And they lampoon that by presenting your player character from Zork as exactly that. So they had a lot of fun with it. I mean, there's, I really wish I just had, you know, a thousand.

thousand hours of my life that I could dedicate to playing through all the Zork and Zork-related games because so much love and care and cleverness and inventiveness went into the creating these. And they are unfortunately, I think a relic sort of lost a time. I can understand why Zork has failed to sort of continue to carry on beyond the FMV era because how do you capture what made Zork a Zork? Yeah. I mean, YouTubers can't do a let's play of Zork where they're screaming over the footage.

So it's failing to capture young minds, I think. But, and it really interesting topic. I didn't realize we'd get this much out of it. But, yeah, or the series went on for this long. Yeah, I was afraid we wouldn't, like, be able to fill an hour and a half, but we could just keep going. Yeah, I think when you were, when we started this and you were, you were doing the, the dungeon master thing, I was thinking if we had had a whiteboard in here or, you know, where you were, you could map it as we said the directions or we could do it. it just makes me think that this idea could actually work. Yeah, I think an IF podcast would be really interesting.

I'm almost positive. There has to be a... Someone, I'm sure, has done that. A Zork playthrough done via podcast, and I will download it. That'd be fun to do with the live audience. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, do kind of, like, Twitch plays Zork.

Exactly. Yeah. All right, well, anyway, I hope people have enjoyed listening to Dorks on Zorks. Hey, I'm a geek. That's true. That's true. And that's why you haven't really played the games. It doesn't rhyme.

I need to play Zeke. But, yeah, I don't know. Like, this series is really fascinating to me. And I'm glad we finally tackled it for Retronauts because it is, I think, something that people tend to overlook a lot, including ourselves. And I don't know. There's just, it's such a rich world and has been so influential in the design and philosophy of video games. I would love to see someone figure out a way to take the Zork world and make it viable now. But I don't know if that would be possible.

I don't know, like, how would you do that? Part of what makes the series so interesting is that it does, like, it exists in your mind. Yes. I mean, that's why those games are more vivid than the graphic versions they did later, which I don't remember at all. And that goes for a lot of video games where the Zork series stands out of my mind. much more than games that I was looking at. Right. And I mean, even, you know, the official drawings they did, like this starts to make things

look very Wizard of Oz-ish, Oz-ish. Yeah, I can see that. Which I guess is the idea, like the Wizard of Froe-Oz. But you kind of get into like the engravings that appeared in the original Oz books. Very similar. It would be a shame to see these get lost to time, though, because they were pretty magical. And they did have such huge influence.

Well, fortunately, you have, again, Activision is pretty casual about the copyright on them, so they don't go after people who distribute the games. And, you know, you have Archive.org presenting them through a maim interface. I think the format and the file size makes this infinitely shareable throughout time. Just like it was small. I mean, it was big then, but it's just like it's not even a word document now, the size of a word document. Well, and the fact that they designed the technology behind it, the Z engine, to be portable.

It means that basically, you know, all you have to do is come up with your own interpreter for, you know, the Z-I-L, and it can work on anything you want. Yeah, they were really prescienter ahead of their time in that way. It was like a multi-platform game back. Yeah, I mean, the series is basically kind of bulletproof because it was made with portability and sharing and publishing, republishing and conversions in mind. So, yeah, there's... And they didn't even have, like, console exclusives back there. It wasn't just Apple 2, you know, for the first month.

Right, exactly. Pre-order Sorg 2. It kind of was, but not deliberately. Not deliberately. Not deliberately. Like, Sorg Zero appeared on Macintosh first, but that's just because that's how they built the engine. I have the day one edition. Oh, yeah?

One extra house. Does it get like a special something for your gamer tag? One extra house. It gives you an extra adjective to describe yourself. Like, I'm stronger than everyone else. All right. So, thanks everyone for listening. Thanks, Jeff, for showing up.

Thanks for having me. Where can we find you on the Internet, Jeff? Are we able to find you on the Internet? Well, I think mostly Twitter these days, but, you know, you have to endure a lot of Trump tweets if you want to read me. I think we're all the same way these days. The latest in the Flathead Dynasty. There you go. That's at Greenspeak.

And Bob, how about yourself? You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo, and I want to point out I have another podcast. I have had it for two years, but now I quit my job and I live off of it and Retronauts together. The other podcast is Talking Simpsons. You probably know about it. It's a chronological exploration of The Simpsons. And right now, we have a Patreon funding it and more shows on top of that. So if you go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, you can get maybe, by this point, maybe 20 to 30 podcast just by signing up at the $5 level.

So if you want to support me and you like The Simpsons, I think it's a good choice. So it's patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter as GameSpite. And at anything to do with Retronauts pretty much, Retronauts.com. It's a website now, like Nintendo is a cereal. We have great people contributing to the site on a daily basis. I keep trying to interview people and put that on the site. We review games.

It's like, yeah, it's a real website. Come check it out. Did you say you have a cereal too? No, Nintendo has a cereal. Oh, okay. Yeah, wow. Retronaut cereal. I would eat that.

I'm just saying. the 70s. I only use the C3POOs. That would go well in Berkeley. That's true. That is true. Old world of grains. Of course, Retronauts, you can find at Retronauts.com and on iTunes and at Podcast 1 and the Podcast 1 app. The show, besides being supported by all the wonderful ads that you don't skip and listen to and realize that they are a practical matter for us of survival. We're also supported through Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you will support the show for $3 a month, you will get early access to video, or audio, sorry, not video. I lied. Anyway, it's a worthwhile thing, I think. We do work hard to talk about old

video games to keep the Zork legacy alive. So, once again, thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another full episode, and of course, on Odd Fridays with Retronauts Micro. It's what we do. So we'll talk at you some more then.

Bye. The Oh, and then, Oh, and Ah, and A, and Oh, Oh,

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I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what

they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.