ZORK : The Game That Started It All (for me) (ALSO : WHAT IS A GRUE?)

Zork came out in the 1980's from Infocom for various computer platforms such as Commodore 64, Apple II and TRS-80. It's the game that started me down the path to playing role playing games. My interest 'grue' from Zork to other PC type games, but ultimately I honed in on the pencil and paper game of Dungeons and Dragons.
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Have you ever played Zork?
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#gamemasters #gamemastershere #zork

[@JeffWitty]

ZORK! Loved it! When I went onto college in the early 90s - I got into MUDs. I co-ran a MUD (PsychoMUD) and coded for it till i left school. I briefly resurrected it early in my I.T. career till I moved overseas. that was 20 years ago. thanks for the memory flashback!

[@gamemasters]

Zork was always a fun one, no question!

[@thealleys]

This blew my mind on the Commodore 64 as a kid. Thanks for bringing back good memories, sir.

[@gamemasters]

it blew my mind as well. I swear it was the best damn escape I've ever experienced in playing a game. PURE imagination on the visuals and just a flat out fun time spent in my youth.

[@derekjohnson424]

Ohh Zork! The art of adventure! I remember being a kid when my dad first got a CD drive for the computer in the 90s. Return to Zork was the test program, the first thing we installed with it. Those were wonderful memories! Me and my siblings watched over the shoulder of our mom play many adventure games in those days: the King's Quest series, Inherit the Earth, the Myst series, and of course Zork. Those all left an indelible mark and love for adventure in all of us.

[@gamemasters]

Thank you for sharing that memory! Zork will always hold meaning for me and.. wow would I love to play a new version of it!

[@MndScream]

I honestly miss games like this but I also admit I never finished any of the Infocom greats. Planetfall and Leather Goddesses were always fun too (=

[@gamemasters]

I think there were very few that I didn't complete. Aside from the Zork related games, my other favorite that they put out was Deadline.

[@JoeChrisMorris]

@@gamemasters Planetfall was hard, I bet only Douglas Adams won through that. Deadline was genius, with certain events only happening at certain times: the son opening the safe at 12 for the revised will, the partner shooting Ms. Dunbar .. You could arrest someone!

[@MrFleem]

I remember when I first played Zork, back in the 80s. Presented with the house that I was obviously supposed to investigate, the first thing I did was go get lost in the forest.

[@gamemasters]

oh me as well. I spent many play sessions trying to map out the forest too..

[@freddaniel5099]

Zork, or Dungeon as we knew it, was a game we played in college on a DEC mainframe. The text only format really helped unlock our imagination. What is a "vandal" we asked? The darn maze thief was a major obstinate until we discovered his "hiding hole". Awesome times (late 1970s).

[@gamemasters]

I could never get enough zork. I still, to this day, feel like there is something in it that no one has discovered yet.... even though the source code was given out and everything was revealed... but...... I'm not convinced that it was THE source code... I need to boot up my C64 and load in my floppies and play it that way again.

[@franciscosantossilva4202]

I came late to Zork, but the first game that got me into roleplaying was Champions of Krynn, the first of the Dragonlance Gold Box series. Spent endless hours on that.

[@gamemasters]

that was a fun game!

[@JoeChrisMorris]

@@gamemasters Tas forever

[@RandyKalista]

Never knew what a grue was either. Until I recently started reading Jack Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth. There's never a real description of a grue. Until characters stumble upon a leather folio from the wizard Follinense. In it are very brief notes of "half-men" creatures. There are gids, deodands, erbs, leocomorphs, bazils, and... "GRUE: man, ocular bat, the unusual hoon." And that's all we're given, still leaving a wonderful amount to our imagination-which is what I now love Jack Vance for.

[@gamemasters]

ooh yes! that's right! Jack Vance is the one that created the Grue!!!

[@disciple012]

Since Activision now owns Zork, they added a fun little easter egg in Call of Duty: Black Ops. At the start of the game, you are a POW that is strapped in a chair. You can break free from the bindings and walk around the room. You can find a computer and interact with it. It will bring up a DOS prompt and if you type in Zork, you can play the full first game.

[@gamemasters]

HAHA that's awesome!!!

[@MarkCorder]

The first computer game I ever played! - on my first computer: an 8088-XT PC-Clone with twin 360K floppy drives. (Monochrome amber monitor.) I also loved "The Lurking Horror", and you can have all these old Infocom games to run on DOS-Box or other emulators...

[@gamemasters]

woah! twin floppy drives! That's style! I loved the later versions of the Infocom games that came with feelies. I still have my GUE Tech Student ID card that came with Lurking Horror (and the little rubber centipede)!

[@MarkCorder]

@@gamemasters LOL - yeah, I know I'm dating myself with that one, and I had the centipede stuck to the side of my monitor! (Hercules graphics, 800x600 max res.) I also remember imagining how useful a computer could be to my other hobby, which was AD&D! I even have some old MS-DOS "Dungeon Master's Assistant" titles somewhere in my collection...

[@gamemasters]

I've got those DM Assistant discs somewhere in a box too. I had a Commodore 64, then upgraded to the C-128 when it came out. Then later it was all about IBM compatible computers.

[@RedneckWraith]

I named my first PC Zork in honor of this game!

[@gamemasters]

Nice!

[@aaronbrown5776]

My favorite from that era was Zyll. My friends and I still talk about it. I remember being in college and seeing MUDs (a friend showed me), but for once I made the right choice and said, "I start playing this with you guys, I'm going to flunk out..."

[@gamemasters]

that "flunk out" for me was Magic the Gathering... Ahhh.... fond memories of the student center though... and then they installed Mortal Kombat... I had to avoid the SC at all costs at that point...

[@howshafern420]

I played ZORK Long long before i understood how to play, I just enjoyed exploring the world and inspiring my imagination. Have often wished there was a virtual version of the world to explore just to see how others imagined this world looked.

[@gamemasters]

there was a game called Zork Grand Inquisitor that included the small white house with a boarded up front door in it, it was "3d" where you could walk through visually, but I mean.. we're talking graphics from 1997.. BUT it also had "video" embeds in it of actual people and physical locations, for the time it was high production. BUT that all said.. I'd LOVE to see an actual Zork Theme park... ooooh that would be kick ass.

[@RiggsBF]

Return to Zork had the most evil laugh in video games.

[@thejohnsaye]

yep, i'm one of those infocom dudes of which you speak, down to the iron-on Moonmist logo. i wore that t-shirt a long time

[@gamemasters]

oooh nice! I used to grab up everything I could find infocom related, never had the shirt for moonmist though, but somewhere I do still have the castle blueprint map.

[@artistpoet5253]

I fell in to RPGs with D&D Moldvay editions. I didn't learn about ZORK until MC Frontalot's song It Is Pitch Dark. More of a arcade gamer than a home computer one. Although, around the mid 90's The Legend of Zelda: A Link To the Past was my first console RPG. And credit has to be given to the arcade coin eating monster that is Gauntlet. I play that on my PS5 now. Still fun.

[@gamemasters]

The Elf shot the food! man... did I ever pump quarters into that machine!

[@SprocketWalker]

I love Zork! Thank you for the video.

[@gamemasters]

zork will always be my favorite adventure game!

[@AndyReichert0]

my first TTRPG was Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. it had dice sizes, skills, modifiers, checks, and role-playing. the fact that a character "sheet" was a single playing card took all the intimidation out of it. it was a great entry level game for me and a bunch of other non-math-wiz people who would not have been able to handle D&D without playing Pathfinder ACG first.

[@jamiestreet1785]

Never heard of this.. thanks for the history lesson

[@gamemasters]

!!! You gotta check out the emulator I listed in the description, many a folk will get sucked into Zork!

[@raymondgarrison8589]

Leather Goddess of Phobos had an interesting bosskey.

[@gamemasters]

I was also fond of Leisure Suit Larry and the Land of the Lounge Lizards... I should do a video on that one at some point... I mean... it's gotta be tame by today's standards, right?

[@AuntieHauntieGames]

Zork? Sir. We *MUST* be friends. Best friends. Either that or you need to let me somehow entrap you in a lantern. Up to you.

[@gamemasters]

!! at least in a lantern, I'd never get eaten by a grue!

[@GraemeCree]

It would be hard to do a game like this now. Not because it's text, but because it has no story. It has a *goal*, to be sure. And it has a backstory. But not a story going on in the present. Reviewers commented on that when Blank and Berlyn released Zork: The Undiscovered Underground in the 90's. Blank had to point out that all the Zork games had been like that. These days, with few exceptions (Return to Mysterious Island, for example), games need to have characters to interact with. When Her Interactive released Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships, people went nuts. Since there was only one obvious suspect hanging around in plain view, that meant he was the only suspect, and therefore the culprit. (Worse yet, he was). People couldn't accept the idea of a culprit who wasn't standing out in the open, and were also really unhappy with a game so light on other characters, even though the game took place on a desert island, where you wouldn't expect to see a lot of people. Zork I is even "worse" in that respect. Oh, it has the Thief and the Troll, and but they're just obstacles, not actual characters that you can interact with.

[@gamemasters]

I dunno, I kinda dig the style, I've even used ChatGPT to create a Zork style game, took me about 2 hours to play it. I think there is still a market out there for an all text adventure game like Zork. Given, it might just be for the old folks like me that initially played it way back when..

[@GraemeCree]

@@gamemasters Oh, I like it, although I don't think it's Infocom's best game. It's in the top half, though. There are people who still make text adventures, mostly fast food games that take an hour or so to play, in a language called Inform, which is basically a freeware version of Infocom's own programming language. I think they still have a yearly game-writing contest.

[@Styner09]

My absolute favorites are games that have consequences for your actions. Chrono Trigger, Deus Ex, and more recently Undertale and West of Loathing. I hope to make something similar.

[@RodBatten]

It's been a while since I played any interactive fiction games, I should probably fix that. There's still a pretty active group of fans and an annual contest. You should also try the Colossal Cave adventure, sometimes called adventure or advent, and a few other freely available games. You can get a ton of free game files and interpreters at the IF Archive. They have the added advantage of running on pretty much any device.

[@gamemasters]

annual contest?? tell me more about that!

[@robertgray821]

Zork, the Original AI DM!

[@gamemasters]

LOL I should change the title of the video to that!

[@hcpookie]

Yeah I thought this was going to be a vid about a new AI DM at first :D

[@malcolmogilvy4885]

Just got the original discs Zork 1, 2 and 3, with the stickers fallen off the discs the stickers are there will get them stuck back onto the discs just surreal bought two massive batches of discs off two different sellers around three to four hundred discs in total with countless original software discs and game discs also hundreds of discs with games copied to them but really interested in these Zork discs that just searched for them on youtube and found your video some of the others you mentioned also have seen amongst them lol hit the Jack Pot whee haww

[@gamemasters]

NICE! My "white whale" is finding the Zork Trilogy box in tact that come with the zorkmid coin. Talk about a jack pot... that coin sells for a pretty penny!

[@saraphys5555]

Zork sounded really familiar, but doing some research, It doesn't seem like it had another name that I recognise; although Spellbreaker sounds familiar. Though this game (and others like it) seem to have inspired the games I played growing up, like Hugo's House of Horror's...LOL, that was a crazy game!

[@gamemasters]

there were several games that came out shortly after Zork that were quite similar

[@rkcpek]

For me it was Adventure/ Colossal Caves.

[@gamemasters]

Aye !

[@GraemeCree]

Another factor that probably led to the name change is that TSR Games already had a board game called Dungeon. I like the series, although Zork III is one of my least favorite Infocom games. Zork I is fine, but I've never quite gotten past the fact that it was so obviously a knock-off of Colossal Cave, right down to the maze of twisty little passages (Early versions of the game mentioned their debt to Colossal Cave explicitly). There are some improvements. A better parser, replacing pits with grues, and so forth, but the game is heavily derivative. Oddly enough, even back in the day, people rarely mentioned or complained about this.

[@gamemasters]

I played only after it came out from microsoft, I think at that point it was just called 'Adventure'. As a side note, they released a graphical version earlier this year for PS5, Xbox, PC, Nintendo, etc.

[@GraemeCree]

@@gamemasters I saw Colossal Cave before I saw Zork, but probably a lot of people did back then. In at least two versions of Zork I, the leaflet in the mailbox explicitly says that the game is "inspired by the ADVENTURE game of Crowther and Woods". The Microsoft version was called "Microsoft Adventure", and is a pretty faithful port of the original, except that it has one extra room, a programmer's lair, located north of the Soft Room. If you mess with things in there, the programmer might scatter your possessions to make life difficult. There's a place on the web where you can play that in a browser. I was going to try the graphical version, but I didn't have a working Windows 10 system. I do now, so I'll probably get it. I don't expect to enjoy it as much that way (too many visuals that don't do anything) but we'll see. Unfortunately, the demo version of the original Adventure on Roberta William's site doesn't work. (You can't fill the bottle with either water or oil). I reported that to the guy who gave them the code. He showed that it works on HIS site, but not theirs. Weird. Zork I is a better technical game, if only because of the full sentence parser. But there are other Infocom games that make much better use of it.

[@SprocketWalker]

May you someday get a Zorkmid coin for your collection (if you don't already have one). I can't believe how much they cost! I'd love to get one someday. If you're interested, I made a video of the Zork Conquest At Quiendor book.

[@gamemasters]

Oooh I'd love to watch! I've got links turned off but let me know its name and I'll avoid grues as I make my way over to watch!

[@SprocketWalker]

@@gamemasters Nice! It's a 3-part video. Just search for "Gamebook Adventure Zork Conquest At Quendor."

[@JoeChrisMorris]

Remember the grue repellant!

[@gamemasters]

always!

[@JoeChrisMorris]

@@gamemasters though Zork3 was easier even than Zork2, even with the repellent! Zork 3 had 8 points. You just had to remember not to kill the DM!

[@JoeChrisMorris]

Zork..Ultima..M.U.L.E...good games back then

[@gamemasters]

River Goddess of Phobos! Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards! Deadline! Blue Max! all fun games! Bard's Tale...

[@JoeChrisMorris]

@@gamemasters Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy LIED to you, and that doesn't even have to do with getting the Babel fish!

[@davesteller6301]

Wish i could play this on my android

[@gamemasters]

you... sortav.. can. there are plenty of websites where it's free to play, you can always pull up one in a browser on your android and play it that way. My only issue with that is that the font is sooooo tiny and my eyes have gotten soooo bad...