Gamasutra’s History Series Visits Land of Zork

Gamasutra along with the IGDA’s preservation SIG have teamed up to highlight the history of the first ten games voted into the Digital Game Cannon. This first article highlights the history of the classic world of Zork highlighting all its adventures, its evolution and eventual place int he history of video and computer games. Zork holds a special place in my heart as someone old enough to have played the games as they were released. Heck I even had two of the “Choose your own adventure” style Zork books when I was a youngster. Through the age of the text based command parser to the interactive movie and Myst-like final games Zork is a title that should never lose its relevance to gaming as one of the giants of the now bygone age of adventure games. Reading this piece brings back memories of hours of hunt and pecking typing trying to arrange nouns and verbs to get the world to do what I though tit needed to.. and who can forget that Zork spawned such classics as The Leather Goddesses of Phobos and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text adventure games?

I feel old now. Time to go take my Geritol and have my hip replacement surgery scheduled.