Let’s take another trip in the "Wayback Machine", this week back to the first days of the PC.   Today, we’ll take a look at the very first game that I got for my first IBM PC, Zork.   Understand that back then most of the software available for your PC was business software.  The closest thing to a game (other than Zork) that I was aware of was something called Lemonade Stand, the goal of which was to make money by balancing costs of lemons versus the selling price of a glass of lemonade.

Anyway enough about lemons; let’s get back to Zork.

The game begins with these now famous words: "You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.  There is a small mailbox here."  Utilizing text commands, the player was to navigate this virtual word and collect treasure and battle monsters.  The commands were intuitive:” walk south”, “look”, “take bottle”, “hit monster”, etc.

The game has absolutely no graphics; it was up to the player and his/her imagination to envision the world of Zork.  Below is a picture of a drawing done by Steven Ray in January of 1981 of what the imaginary world of Zork might look like.  This map is an accurate representation of the game’s geography.

Zork was one of those games where you found yourself up till 2:00 AM playing, having lost all sense of time because you were so immersed in the gameplay.  We would even have Zork parties in our dorm rooms where we would drink beer and see just how smart the parser was by telling it to "kiss the tree" or " “walk east” until there was no more map.

We would create our own games in the world of Zork: one was to dig a hole and then proceed to bury whatever the contents of our backpack and then letting other players try to figure out where we had buried the stash.  We would give them hints, but it would cost them a beer per hint.

While doing research for this article (i.e. recalling my experiences with the game) I found that Zork turned 30 this year on June 2.  If you want to try out Zork for yourself, or take a walk down memory lane, you can try it online here.

Did you enjoy this article? Please bookmark it onto: