Zork Zero

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Zork Zero
Studio Infocom
Publisher Infocom
Senior Developer Steve Meretzky
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 October 19, 1988
platform Apple II , Commodore Amiga , MS-DOS , Mac OS
Game engine Z-machine
genre Text adventure
Game mode Single player
control keyboard
medium diskette
language English
copy protection Feelies

Zork Zero (full title Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz , English for Zork Zero: Die Rache des Megaboz ) is a text adventure by Infocom from 1988. In contrast to earlier, puristic Infocom games, Zork Zero contains a graphical interface.

action

Zork Zero takes place before the eight previously published games in the Zork universe. In 789 GUE, King Dimwit Flathead had a statue built in his own honor that was so large that the Fublio Valley was completely in shadow. One resident of this valley, the magician Megaboz the Magnificent, was so angry that he cast a curse on the king, his family and the entire empire and then disappeared. The court wizards could temporarily stop the curse with a counterspell, but in the foreseeable future the curse would destroy the entire empire. 94 years later the time has come: the anniversary of the curse has dawned and destruction is imminent. The player plays an adventurer who wants to lift the curse in order to reap half the kingdom promised by the current King Wurb Flathead as a reward. To do this, he has to find 24 items belonging to the royal family, place them in a cauldron and say a magical word over the cauldron. In his search for the 24 objects, the player travels the entire realm as well as some metaphorical places beyond the known world.

Game principle and technology

Zork Zero is a text adventure with some graphic elements. Environment and events are displayed as screen text and the player's actions are also entered as text via the keyboard. In visual terms, the game goes beyond the approaches of its predecessor Beyond Zork and offers, in addition to a graphic frame for the game screen and an interactive navigation map, menus that can be operated with the mouse, an illustrated lexicon of the game universe and graphically illustrated mini-games.

Zork Zero contains over 200 rooms, over 100 objects and as many puzzles as the three games in the Zork trilogy put together. The parser understands more than 1600 words. For comparison: Enchanter , which was originally supposed to come onto the market in 1983 as Zork IV , contains 74 rooms and 33 objects.

Zork Zero contained a printed calendar with portraits of important characters from the gaming universe, a plan of a labyrinth and a (reprinted) handwritten note as enclosures ("Feelies") . These supplements are referenced in the game and therefore represent copy protection.

Production notes

In 2019, the source code of the game was published on the software development repository GitHub .

reception

In contemporary reviews, the usability (especially the parser) and the game documentation were positively highlighted. Criticized were the sometimes poorly worked out plot, slow performance on computers with little memory and individual game elements that, without any function for the game progress, would unnecessarily prolong the game.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Review on Adventure Classic Gaming
  2. ↑ GitHub.com: Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz, by Steve Meretzky of Infocom (1988). Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Computer Gaming World 55, January 1989, p. 20