Zork

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Zork
Zork Box.jpg
Packaging of Zork next to a computer
Studio Infocom
Publisher Infocom
Senior Developer Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, Dave Lebling
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 November 1980
platform Apple II , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore 128 , Commodore Amiga , Commodore Plus / 4 , CP / M , Mac OS , MS-DOS , MSX , PC-98 , PC Booter , PDP-10 , PlayStation , Schneider CPC , Sega Saturn , TRS-80 , TRS-80 CoCo
Game engine ZIL
genre Text adventure
Game mode Single player
control keyboard
medium CD-ROM (Anthology), diskette , download , cassette (Mini-Zork I)
language English

Zork is an early computer game from the US company Infocom . The game, developed on a mainframe computer , is the second adventure in the history of computer games in the public eye . Due to the limited storage space of home computers and data carriers at the time, the publication was made in three independently playable parts.

action

Zork I

The game begins in the immediate vicinity of a wooden house painted white in the middle of a forest. The player starts the game without a clear task, but after entering the wooden house and finding an entrance to the "Great Underground Empire" there, it quickly becomes clear that the goal of the game is to steal 20 valuable artifacts and put them in a showcase in the To deposit wooden house.

Zork II

In the second part of the game, the player explores the realm of the "Wizard of Frobozz", an ancient magician whom the player must fight and defeat.

Zork III

In the third part of the game you have to track down the "Dungeon Master", defeat him and take over his position.

Game principle and technology

Zork is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is largely up to the player's imagination. The character is controlled via commands that the player enters using the keyboard and that are processed by a parser . The commands are in natural language and allow the game character to interact with his environment. The player can move through the game world, find objects, apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . As the story progresses, more locations in the game world will be unlocked.

Production notes

Zork was originally programmed in 1977 by the students Marc Blank and Dave Lebling from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in MDL on a mainframe computer of the brand DEC PDP-10 . Although it is a fantasy game, it contains numerous allusions to everyday university work, influenced by the academic background of its authors. The source texts of the early versions and their offshoots are available in some repositories . The model was the game Adventure by computer scientists William Crowther and Don Woods . A commercial market for computer games did not yet exist; so the game was first spread between students. At around the same time, inspired by Adventure , other text adventures were developed at various universities, primarily in the United States, but they were far from being as popular as Zork . By 1979 the game experienced numerous improvements and expansions, in which the students Tim Anderson and Bruce Daniels played a significant role.

After most of Zork's programmers had completed their studies in 1979, they founded the Infocom company on June 22, 1979 , ported the game to the then common home computers and sold it commercially to a larger audience. Because of the smaller diskette and memory sizes of home computers, only part of the original Zork was initially published under the name Zork 1 . In the following years, Zork 2 and Zork 3 followed , which continued the story and in some cases went beyond the non-commercial Zork . In 1980 or 1981 the game was briefly renamed Dungeon , but this was reversed after the intervention of the Dungeons & Dragons rights holder Tactical Studies Rules .

Beyond Zork and Zork Zero appeared later . Infocom has also developed other text adventures over the years (the Enchanter trilogy also takes place in the Zork world). With "Zork" one meant colloquially among the MIT computer scientists a meaningless word like "Dingsda". A version of the game ported to Fortran was titled Dungeon .

In contrast to most other Infocom games, Zork I to III can also be released without the printed additional materials of the original packaging. In keeping with the customs of the time, however, they were also more difficult. Using so-called interpreters , like all Infocom games, they can be played not only on PCs, but on a large number of systems, from simple PDAs to Macs , Amigas and Unix- based systems to supercomputers. A German-language version of Zork was created by Jeff O'Neill ( Ballyhoo , Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It ), but was never published.

Successors and Derivatives

Zork on an iPhone

After the demise of Infocom , Return to Zork was released in 1993 , which was to continue the Zork series as a graphic adventure . The company Activision had taken over Infocom and in 1996 still published the highly regarded Zork Nemesis and a year later the not so successful Zork: The Grand Inquisitor . On the Internet, Hotel New Zork temporarily appeared on the Activision website - a graphics game to click, which should inspire the player to buy Zork Nemesis . As part of an advertising campaign for Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Infocom veterans Marc Blank (founder) and Michael Berlyn (programmer) programmed the little game Zork - The Undiscovered Underground , which takes the player back into the vaults of the "Great Underground" in classic text mode Empire “kidnapped. In 1996, all Zork parts (except for the Grand Inquisitor ) were combined in a Zork Special Edition . In 2010, Zork was integrated as a mini game in Call of Duty: Black Ops .

From 2009 to 2011 there was Legends of Zork, a browser game that was programmed and hosted for Activision by the Irish company Jolt Online Gaming and based on the Zork universe. The game was financed through microtransactions , but was discontinued after two years due to unsuccessfulness.

In the United States, some books were published that played in the Zork world. Robin W. Bradley wrote the novel The Lost City of Zork and George Alec Effinger wrote The Zork Chronicles . Steve Meretzky , who was instrumental in some Infocom adventures and later worked for the adventure company Legend Entertainment , wrote four play books . The reader has a text in front of him and at the end of each page can decide on which page he would like to continue reading. Two so-called "Infocomics", interactive comics for home computers, appeared in 1988 under the names Zork Quest and Zork Quest II .

reception

Computer Gaming World emphasized the quality of the parser and its speed and described the game as "worth the money for anyone who is even vaguely interested in adventure games". Graham Nelson , inventor of the Inform programming languageand one of the fathers of modern interactive fiction , describes Zork in his manifesto The Craft of the Adventure as an imitation of adventure , which works better as a game than the original, but places less emphasis on a convincing game environment. The recurring references to the Flathead dynasty are tiring in the long run, and the game, unlike later Infocom games, is buggy. Nick Montfort, professor of digital media at MIT , emphasizes that Zork is a literary, playful and information technology artefact and, unlike adventure, has a “powerful narrative”. In describing geological conditions,however, Zork fallsbehind the model. It becomes clear that the game, like many other text adventures, was written from a male perspective because of its developmental environment. In a paper on artificial intelligence in computer games, the computer science doctoral student Phil Goetz stated in 1994 that the thief, one of the NPCs in the game, was the first NPC "with personality" in the history of computer games. Montfort explains thatwith the design of the thief as the first computer game, Zork takes upclassic motifs from narrative theory and confronts the player with a character developed "villain" who can then be physically defeated, which gives the player a feeling of deep satisfaction. This process of action goes back to the theories of the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp .

Zork contained several content elements that were cited as a running gag in other Infocom works and found their way into popular culture through use in other media. The Grue, for example, is a fictional animal that appears in the game only in the dark and feeds on adventurers. It is based on a character from the work of Jack Vance and is used in the game as a reason why the player cannot explore dark rooms. The Grue was also triggered by the popularity of the game in the Infocom adventures Beyond Zork , Planetfall , Sorcerer , Spellbreaker , Starcross , Suspect , Wishbringer and Zork: The Undiscovered Underground as well as in the graphic adventures Return to Zork , Zork Nemesis and later developed by Activision Zork: Grand Inquisitor used. Outside the Infocom universe, the Grue was ranked 46th in the 2010 list of "Top 100 Video Game Villains of All Time" by US IGN magazine. In the computer games Clicker Heroes and Don't Starve as well as the computer game based on the animated film The SpongeBob SquarePants Film , grues are causes of death for the player using the formulations used by Infocom. The nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot dedicated the song It Is Pitch Dark to the Grue . In Zork, the number 69,105 is used as a synonym for a large number , which has a special mathematical feature: 69 in the hexadecimal system corresponds to 105 in the decimal system , and 69 in the decimal system corresponds to 105 in the octal system . To visualize a large number of things, the number 69,105 was used in various other Infocom games, also in the adventure I-0 by the writer Adam Cadre , in the role-playing game Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar and in the MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing . The game Zork itself is in a playable version as Easter Egg in the first-person shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops and the browser of anonymity network Tor available and takes in the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline an important role.

Single track

  1. Zork (1980) from Infocom
  2. Zork II (1981) from Infocom
  3. Zork III (1982) from Infocom
  4. Enchanter (1983) from Infocom
  5. Sorcerer (1984) from Infocom
  6. Wishbringer (1985) from Infocom
  7. Spellbreaker (1985) from Infocom
  8. Beyond Zork (1987) from Infocom
  9. Zork Zero (1988) from Infocom
  10. Return to Zork (1993) from Infocom / Activision
  11. Zork Nemesis (1996) from Activision
  12. Zork: The Grand Inquisitor (1997) by Activision
  13. Zork - The Undiscovered Underground (1997) by Activision
  14. Legends of Zork (2009) from Jolt Online Gaming

Game books

Novels

Web links

Commons : Zork (computer game series)  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ itafroma / zork-mdl
  2. ↑ zork-source-code-is-a-master-class-in-game-developer-trolling on kotaku.com
  3. ↑ Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages - An Approach to Interactive Fiction . The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2003, ISBN 0-262-13436-5 , pp. 102 .
  4. ↑ Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages - An Approach to Interactive Fiction . The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2003, ISBN 0-262-13436-5 , pp. 95 .
  5. ^ A b Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages - An Approach to Interactive Fiction . The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2003, ISBN 0-262-13436-5 , pp. 100 .
  6. ↑ GetLamp.com: L'avventura è l'avventura. Retrieved July 2, 2017 .
  7. ↑ CGW January 2.1, 1982, p. 32. (PDF) Retrieved on August 15, 2015 .
  8. ^ Graham Nelson: The Craft of the Adventure . January 1995, p. 5 ( ibiblio.org [PDF]).
  9. ^ Phil Goetz: Interactive Fiction and Computers . 1994 ( mud.co.uk ).
  10. ↑ Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages - An Approach to Interactive Fiction . The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2003, ISBN 0-262-13436-5 , pp. 113 .
  11. ↑ Listal.com: The Top 100 Videogame Villains. Retrieved October 13, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Wayne Santos: The Joke's On You . In: GameAxis Unwired . June 2008, p. 66 (English).