I finally sat down and finished Zork I last night. It was a terrific game, and I was going to do a little write-up but really, there’s nothing I can say that hasn’t already been covered in great detail over at the Digital Antiquarian and Renga in Blue, so I’m moving right along to Zork II.
My aim is to finish this one this week, and I’ve set a goal for myself to cover a game a week going forward from here. I find I do better when I set little goals like this for myself, so I expect to make a new post every Wednesday, with gameplay taking place mostly over the weekends.
Stay tuned…
Zork II was my favorite of the Zorks. And aside from being a fun game, early versions had some fun bugs. Most but not all are fixed in later versions. A few of my favorites:
“read all” could be used to take some untakeable things.
The aquarium could be commanded to do things: “aquarium, drop baby” or “aquarium, east”. This was only intended to work with the robot, but they had a shortage of object attribute bits, and had to reuse some.
If you got all three crystal spheres into one place, and looked into one, the game would go into infinite recursion and quickly crash.