It was strictly coincidence: someone who wasn't particularly interested in them herself sent me copies (illegal ones, ooh!!) of two games called Zork I and II. Out of curiosity I loaded them, had that famous opening sentence appear on the screen and slowly became hooked. When the third adventure appeared in the shops, I bought it. When the whole collection came out years later, I bought that too. Text adventures wouldn't have the shine they have to me if it hadn't been for Zork.
This is the first game - set of three games, rather - that I've been pleasurably addicted to, as opposed to brainlessly and repetitively playing them (yes, I'm talking to you, Space Invaders) to put off doing homework. Zork I, II and III moved from my first Amstrad 512 with as much RAM (thankfully sold years ago) to the 286, then 486, then the computers of Pentium levels, always playable, always fun, never suffering from problems with hardware. I sometimes still start them and go through the whole journey again - by now I know all the solutions - just to get that feeling of being all alone (the few game characters being little more than moving scenery) in a huge dusty attic of a dungeon begging for exploration. The influence of Dungeons and Dragons, that board game so suitable for adapting to the computer, is obvious: an adventurer gathering points and moving up in rank, a dungeon, treasures to collect, and the aim of the third adventure: to become the new Dungeon Master. But: no roleplaying, no party of adventurers, and no real combat; the first game had two characters to kill, but that was it; the third game's successful ending even depends on deliberately not killing the combatant. The sense of a dusty attic was greatest in the first game; the second game seemed to take place in an earlier moment in time when the Round Room was still functional, whereas the third game had the player hopping back to the very time when the civilization already hinted at in the games before was still alive and well.
This hinted-at past, notably the old influential Flathead family, was expanded on in the spinoffs of this trilogy: the two text adventures Beyond Zork: the Coconut of Quendor and Zork Zero (and three others: Enchanter, Sorcerer and Spellbreaker, connected with Zork through the character Belboz), and three graphical adventures, Zork Nemesis, Return to Zork and Zork: the Grand Inquisitor. They had one, in my eyes, fatal flaw: they included other characters besides the adventurer. Gone was that wonderful sense of aloneness. To compare, I'll briefly summarize each of the text-only games: Zork I, starting with that famous white house, has the player venturing underground to collect treasures for the trophy case; regularly coming up for air, so to speak. It ends in the journey to the barrow. In Zork II, the player starts in the barrow, and the only way is down. Here, the player's aim is to liberate a genie kept captive by the insane and rather obstructive (he keeps casting spells on the adventurer) Wizard of Frobozz, by collecting four orbs, each orb showing the room in which the next is kept. The treasures collected here are payment for the genie. Zork III starts above ground, but the world above is as weird and barren as the world below, and they are not so clearly separated. The treasures to collect this time are the artifacts carried by every self-respecting Dungeon Master; counting points and advancing in rank are not so important. From the fog rolling in past a sword in a stone to the museum of the Flathead royal family, I'm more a bemused, bewildered tourist than an adventurer, although more than before I have to avoid stupid decisions that will cause death. This third game features two kinds of time machine, the second of which sends me to rooms in the previous two games, a room in the present game, and a scene of a human sacrifice (wrong move! restore from last save!) from Zork spinoff Enchanter. In Beyond Zork, however, I have to travel through inhabited areas to find a ridiculous artifact (quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Where'd you get the coconut?") and in Zork Zero I may be the last survivor, but I'm dogged by this stupid jester and the objective of the game (as well as finding items connecting by the, by now well-documented, twelve Flatheads) is to unravel this jester's past!
It gets worse. To go along with the fashion of the time, the next three titles were graphical with point-and-click interfaces. I heard that Zork Nemesis - for this reason I still haven't given it a go - wasn't funny!! What a shocking departure from Zork's hitherto unbroken tradition of wit! The fans were devastated. Hence the reassuring title of the second graphical adventure: Return to Zork. (Correction: a game history tells me RTZ came out before Nemesis. However, Nemesis was the first truly graphical Zork adventure I heard of, while RTZ was supposed to be made for the fans who were disappointed in the spinoffs and wanted a game with the real Zork spirit. Not that I could check this at the time, since I was too poor to buy either.) Return to humor, yes; but to the Underground Empire that the fans knew and loved? In a desolate landscape (256 colours, VGA resolution, hopelessly crude by today's standards) the first human face the adventurer sees is that of a lighthouse keeper no longer in possession of all his marbles. The way over land being too dangerous, the only option is to raft to a, well, Wild West pioneer village with mayor and frilly-dress schoolteacher (and Mexican bandit Dungeon Master who punishes the player for any unethical moves). This village is disappearing building by building, there's a boy hiding under the bridge whose father was captured and put to work in a mine, and putting a battery in the brass lamp brings up a wizard who's been in there for a loooong time - not so yee-haw! One important character the player meets is Rebecca Snoot, farmer's daughter, bright pupil who knows ancient languages and owner of a carrot-eating cow and a poodle/hellhound cross; another is a witch who kindly lends a walking stick to get through the marsh alive. They've both sunk below the ground and are now in an underground village that is, bit by bit, becoming a copy of the village as it was above. Finally, there's this evil wizard who's been sealed away and is looking for the same thing as the player: the substance called illuminyte! What is "Zork" about this game, apart from very rare references to the earlier games (notably, the currency being Zorkmids) is its utter strangeness. It's not so much a return to Zork as a hellish vision of Zork after too much mushrooms and tequila. I have enjoyed it, but it's decidedly different from what went before. In total contrast to the solitary text adventure games, this game revolved around interaction with characters. What they say is so important (and they say it so distinctively and expressively: hats off for the voices!) that the player can record their utterances; the soundtrack is so, well, Zorkish that I've often played the game CD as an audio CD; in all, the addition of sound was more important to this adventure than the addition of graphics!
The masterpiece, the final title in the Zork series, was Zork: The Grand Inquisitor. This was written by the same author as Zork Zero and campus comedy The Sorceror's Appliance (and has a smattering of university humour) and I must say: this time he got it right. This title, which I have both in PC and Mac version (detail: the PC version can't deal with two CD drives and detects only the first) is perfect: good sound, good graphics, good voices, good story, most satisfying ending. It is the least estranging Zork adventure of them all, and the most modern, winking at a well-known TV action/comedy of that time through the mention of "Z-team". The story: a total loser in the magic department has by way of revenge risen to power and made magic (and many other things) illegal. Under his tyrannical rule, humans, dragons and, er, brogmoids are all subjected to a kind of pseudo-death known as totemization; visually, they're canned. The player collects three cans and a number of spells from the most bizarre locations (including Hades, where the guards punch in and out, and the original dungeon under the famous white house) to rid the empire from the Grand Inquisitor, an operation which involves, yes, that coconut again, and liberate all those imprisoned souls from their cans. Utterly different from the old Zork, but after Return to Zork, I was prepared. And no less imaginative, for if there's one thing no Zork adventure has ever been short on, it's imagination. The animated scenes in this game are blocky, but the still scenes are not only polished, but essentially Zork. If I ever have the money to have my own house constructed up from the ground, I'll take some screenshots from this game - especially of the lantern-bound wizard's home - and tell the architect: "This is what it should look like."
The Zork Collection excludes Nemesis and the three Belboz-based text adventures, but includes Planetfall, packed as bonus with Zork III and one of the rare text adventures where items can be without meaning or function (boo!). It also includes maps for all games (better than those biro sketches on bits of paper) and very thick manuals documenting the whole Underground Empire from the revenge of the Wizard of Frobozz on king Dimwit Flathead the Excessive (whose palace melted into the famous white house) to the defeat and demise of the Grand Inquisitor. It awakens opposite and contradictory sentiments in me: on the one hand I wallow in all this Zorkness, on the other, I long back for the time of innocence when the white house was just that, a white house.
A parody picture on a Zork fanpage shows a screenshot of the white house in the last adventure with the text added: "If this was your house, you'd be home now."
Mmmm.....
