Zork, Anyone?

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

West of House. You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. “Open mailbox”. Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.

That is the opening to Zork. InfoCom. I remember that company well. I remember their games; text-adventures, where you imagination was the key to a world you couldn’t see. Wow, it’s been so long, I had forgotten. But a WSJ Free Feature today reminded me of those halcyon days.

Titled “Keeping a Genre Alive”, the article discusses the few programmers who are still addicted to text adventures. Once a year, they participate in the annual Interactive Fiction Competition. The contest, just completed, is in its 11th year, and results can be found at that link. These people still write, post, and chat about these games, just text and a cursor on a screen.

More discussion of text adventures (yes, I’m sure the words that come to mind are “boring text adventures”) … and more … can be found here. Oh, and if you’d like a look at some fine old text-adventuring, you can play some free Infocom games online, open-source, here.

We Say: Maybe I’m dating myself, but I played Zork … and Zork II … and Zork III … and so on. Yes, it’s completely different than today’s “leave nothing to the imagination, wow those graphics look dated, buy the latest graphics card if you want to run it” games. Not that I’m against playing Half-Life 2 or DOD: Source (to name some games I’ve played that require some decent hardware). But text adventures, you had to imagine the world and events, and yes, even pull out a pen and paper to map those dungeons, right? It also reminds me of something else that’s diminishing, and will probably continue to do so, as people start downloading “Lost” to their iPods … pulling out a book and reading it on the train, on your way to work, losing yourself in the worlds of Tolkien or Asimov or Heinlein. I still see books, but I see a lot more MP3 players. Ah, well, I wax nostalgic.