In the spirit of John Cage’s excellent Blogging Ultima, I’ve decided to play through every Infocom game from beginning to end, in the order that they were published.

This product announcement for ZORK, which ran in the September 1980 edition of The Mini-Tasker, the DECUS RT-11 SIG Newsletter, was Infocom’s very first advertisement.
My motivation for doing this is simple. Over the years, I’ve owned a copy of nearly every Infocom game, but I’ve only finished two or three of them. Sometimes, I just lost interest in the title, or got distracted by another game and never returned to it. But mostly, I just gave up after encountering a particularly vexing puzzle or maze that I couldn’t be bothered to solve. With a resurgence of my personal interest in interactive fiction spurred on largely by Jason Scott’s excellent GET LAMP documentary, I’ve decided that it’s time to once again slay the proverbial dragon, or at least try to avoid being eaten by a Grue.
I expect this to be somewhat different than what Cage encountered as he played his way through Sosaria, Britannia and the other lands of Richard Garriott’s imagination. Infocom’s games are more numerous, but offer shorter gameplay per title. Additionally, most are standalone games or short series written by different authors, rather than a continuation of a plot and storylines that arc over the entire run of games and guided by one person’s vision.
For actual play, I’ll be using the Apple IIe on the desk next to me. I have most of the original disks I bought way back when with my hard-earned lunch money and allowance; in the cases where I can’t find a disk, or the floppy has gone bad I’ll probably rely on ADTPro and disk images. I can’t really imagine a scenario where I’d have to go with an emulator over the real thing to play. I might switch over to Virtual ][ or AppleWin to take the occasional screenshot.

And finally (yes, I know I’m rambling), I’m not planning on using any of the ready-made walkthroughs that are easily available on the Intarwebs. I’ll be sticking to my collection of Infocom Invisiclues and my copies of the first two volumes of Kim Schuette’s excellent “Book of Adventure Games” series. Desk space is at a premium in my cramped, dirty little office and my pencil-drawn mapping skills are atrocious, so I’ll by doing all my maps in the excellent Trizbort program.
Up next: ZORK I. Stay tuned…