Why are the C64 titles so underwhelming? Is it like a budget line? Or were they like the ones sold at K-Mart or something? They just always look so terrible against the box releases?!

I remember playing Zork II as a kid (1983-ish), trying to figure out the puzzles. (Spoiler Alert!) I was standing in the bucket (after kicking it, of course) and had water in the teapot. The room was dark. I was alone, transfixed on the screen. I always used the white text on blue.

So, I’m standing there, in the bucket, and I type “pour water into bucket”. My face is probably a few inches from the screen. WIRRR WHIRRRT BEEP. The hard drive loads the next section.

******* I HAD DIED *******

Scared the heck out of me.

Zork II was probably my favorite because of the memories of the time.

What’s a fun memory you have playing one of their games?

Such a wholesome bunch, aren't they?

Hello Sailor! Black Ops 1 revival lead me to discover ZORK! About 2 hours in and started making a map for myself, first time ever playing something like this. Started to look up a map and honestly turned the video off pretty fast I don’t want any spoilers. Going to put some time in on this one as if I was a kid back in the 70s with no internet access for help, before I make the jump, any advice on map making or tips to enjoy this journey!? Seems like I’ll have plenty to do till Nov 19th. Cheers in advance!

So I've been drawing some character art for a Zork project I'm working on and I put some of the characters together today to compare them and it ended up resembling a D&D party LOL.

Hello Sailor (Wondering who remembers that little Easter Egg! :)

I checked and didn't see this game mentioned, it's very much inspired by Colossal Cavern (which inspired Zork) and it's got a pretty good (albeit two-word parser) built in. It runs only in Emacs (as it's written in Elisp). It's called Dunnet (on Emacs, it's called "Adventure"). It plays very much like Zork

Enjoy!

Hello everyone,

I recently acquired a secondhand rotary phone and installed freepbx in my homelab. I thought it would be really cool to attempt to port some retro games over and my first thought went straight to Zork.

I had to re-think the UI quite a bit to make this work, but I think it's "dialed-in" now.

https://github.com/aejx00/zorkpbx

I'm trying to identify the track names for the PS1/Sega Saturn release of Zork 1. I have identified most of them but I can't place some. Here's what I have so far:

1. Titles
2. Temple Area
3. Mirror Room Areas
4. Underground
5. ?
6. Canyons and Beaches
7. ?Darkness?
8. The Dam
9. The Rainbow
10. White House
11. Forest
12. Reservoir
13. Blue Glow
14. Troll Fight
15. Troll Defeated
16. The Thief
17. The Cyclops
18. Coal Mine Area
19. Hades
20. The Maze
21. ?
22. ?
23. ?
24. ?
25. Treasure Acquired
26. ?
27. ?
28. ?
29. Inside the Barrow
30. End Credits
31. Bat Room
32. End Credits (same as 30)

Hey Everyone

Thanks for all the support and feedback on Cairn.  Version 2.4.0 is now in the App Store, and now supports the ability to upload materials to your library stories.  This could include original manuals, maps you found online, or any other PDF or image file.  Also supports the ability to attach Infocom hint files (JSON files easily found online in GitHub and elsewhere), a new Inventory bar in the transcript window, and custom object shapes (Round, Octagon, etc).  Also includes a number of ‘under the hood’ features to optimize performance and fixes for several bugs found since the last release.  It’s been a mad fury of work to get to this point, but I still have a pretty extensive backlog of work.

Product Roadmap

• Z7 and Z8 Support
• iPad / iPhone Support
• Graphical Game Support (Beyond Zork)
• Glulx Support
• Sound Effects

Thanks to those of you who supported me by purchasing this game and providing feedback.

App Store Link

Link

Developer Page

Link

I’m not going to reiterate the very valid general arguments against genAI because we’ve all heard them. But I will argue that it specifically goes against the spirit of this sub.

We loved Zork and the ensuing games because they took imagination to write, and they took imagination to play. Infocom’s own print advertising proclaimed imagination to be “the world’s most powerful graphics technology.” Yes, there were a few graphical exceptions among Infocom’s work, but the majority of it was an amazing collaboration between Implementor and player that was achieved through words alone.

Now that technology can simulate imagination, should we just roll over and accept it because it’s the path of least resistance? I don’t think that honors the creativity and innovation that brought us all to this sub in the first place. GenAI bankrupts our own imagination by feeding us nothing but parts cribbed from other creators — the exact opposite of the ingenuity that we’ve long admired from Infocom and other text interactive fiction authors.

Love of the very human creative process brought us here. Generative AI is the exact opposite in many ways. This is my argument for banning it from this sub. Thanks for reading.

(this space intentionally left blank)

Does anyone else have feelies they wish had been made?

I was today years old when I learned that the term troll (in the “Internet troll” sense of the word) is apparently derived from the term “trolling”, which is a fishing term for dragging your line behind you with bait on it to see what bites (or something along those lines).

I realize that, up until now, I think I have always been harboring a hazy (lazy?) secret theory that maybe the term was inspired by our friend from Zork I. Like, maybe whoever first observed the behavior and coined the term, was a Zork player, or even an implement or, who was drawing a parallel to the troll character from the game.

Did anyone else ever entertain that idea? Or is that just wishful fan-conning on my part? :)

Came across this in my social memories today. Love the vibe!

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DKTd1_1OfGc/

Edit: I meant to say REEL video, not real when I posted this, but voice to text screwed me up. Sorry!

It's more remake spam from me: today, the "G.U.E. on 9 Zorkmids a Day" leaflet originally bundled with Zork 2.

This was a fun one to work on, with an interesting layout, loads of lovely illustrations and the usual quirky and amusing writing.

As usual, PDF and PNG downloads are available on Google Drive, or via my website gnusto.au

Share it, remix it, do whatever. A credit is always nice. Enjoy!

hey everyone,

I am a fan of retro games and I just wanted to build something cool with Fable so I attempted building a UI around Zork. Zork is a old text based game (1981), which basically had no UI at all. I did start the project with Opus, but for the pixel art scenes, Fable was able to output something way beyond what Opus was capable of.

I did post it as a comment on another user game yesterday but I am taking the plunge to bring a bit more light to it:

• I open sourced the code, including the skill to generate pixel art scene: https://github.com/posabsolute/zork-ui
• You can play right here: https://zork-ui-production.up.railway.app/

No server, all front-end, no analytics tracking.

Just a quick one: with the recovery of now-dormant "The Zork Library" fansite now very robust, I've gone ahead and mirrored it on my own website. You can check it out at gnusto.au/projects/tzlmirror

Some files that were too large for my (free) hosting having been moved off-site to my Google Drive, but the links should still point to the right place.

Please feel free to have a poke around and note anything that seems busted in the comments. Expect broken download links from time-to-time, but most or all images should now be intact, especially in the Encyclopedia.

I'm running Return to Zork in Boxer, and I'm having a weird sound issue.

I used my original CDROM disc to install it. But whenever I play it, I get this horrible static/distortion noise after videos play, and it will stop when I go to a new screen or another video plays. But it will start again later.

I have tried setting boxer at 386, 486, Pentium, and Max speeds. But if I set it too fast, I get scratches/skips in the music.

I have tried a Sound Blaster 16 setup, and a Roland MT-32 set up.

I have tried playing from my ISO rip, and my BIN/CUE rip.

Nothing seems to fix it.

Anyone have any tips?

I don't remember this being an issue on my old computer, so I don't remember what to do.

TIA

UPDATE: I got it fixed. Reinstalled it and chose Sound Blaster Pro instead of 16. Don't know why but it seems to have issues with a 16 even though it's an option. But the 16 was relatively new at that point, so it makes sense.

But yeah, once I set it to the pro, it got rid of the distortion, and helped improve the skipping noise a little as well.

It was recently brought to my attention that The Zork Library, a fansite dating back decades (and probably the premiere Zork fansite, period) hasn't yet returned to active service after some downtime. With the Zork fanbase aging and interest waning, it's entirely possible the site isn't coming back this time.

So I thought I'd look at the viability of recovering the site from the snapshots made by The Internet Archive/The Wayback Machine. What I've managed to get via a variety of methods is around 4,400 files.

EDIT: Thanks to the incredible foresight of user QuailRider43, it now looks as if the Encyclopedia section is complete! With the addition of their 2018 backup, we've gone from just over 1000 images and misc supplemental files to well over 4000, which is likely to be the entire set. Huge thanks to QuailRider43 for helping to ensure this incredible fandom resource is preserved!

TZL_recovery_v3.zip
You'll want to run it in a Python local web server for everything to display correctly.

This is by no means the entire site. The main attraction is the incredibly exhaustive Encyclopedia Frobozzica, from which many images are still missing; maybe even most images. As best I can tell, a lot of images were simply never cached by The Internet Archive. However, it does appear that most or all of the actual pages have been recovered. The other major victim is the custom version of the Hotel New Zork mini-site, which is missing most of its content. There's other sources for this mini-site, but the TZL version was heavily customised to do away with its overly complex original design.

I've also had to use some automated processes to repair the links in the HTML files, which were modified when the site was cached. I've done some light testing and it seems to be working correctly, but I'm sure there's issues I've not found.

Here's the most important thing: I'm not good at this. Before attempting this recovery, I'd never tried any of this before. I'm working it out as I go along, so it's very likely I'm making mistakes or just entirely doing it wrong. There may be more to recover that I wasn't able to get, so if you know how to do this stuff, I'd love to hear from you! Drop me a message in the comments or send me a DM.

About a year ago I created a Z-Machine ported engine in Godot. Then I came across this [awesome post](Play Z3 games with auto-mapping on your Mac! : zork) by u/djducat, where he added an automapper. Since he wrote it in swift there were no plans to release it for Android so that's when I stepped in.

UI changes that I had added to the Z-Machine are a hint button (can be turned on in settings) that show valid directions and objects you can interact with, all nouns are highlighted and can be clicked on to examine, other interactions you will have to type manually, a search feature that will take you to that exact message, multiple saves, an undo system, and font size/color setting.

These were all quality of life changes I felt these Z3 games drastically needed. If I had more space like a tablet I'd add a few verbs you could click as well but just not enough space on Android.

I had most of these UI additions already done, I felt like they were all things that could slightly bring these games into a better more modern UI system. But honestly the mapping function was something I had never thought of so massive kudos to u/djducat for the idea.

I have only tested it with a few of these games, and I have not gone through every single path with every single one so if you do come across specific bugs let me know. I've tried to work around some of the old known bugs in some of these systems but some still alude me.

Anyways I hope you enjoy these UI updates.

Google Play Link: Xyzzy: Interactive Fiction - Apps on Google Play

The Zork Library web page is no longer working, and I'm curious if anyone happens to have the png that was listed under the History of Zork page for Appendix II, called "Ages of Zork"? I'm going through the original document and working on a sort of fancy-looking version of it and I sort of need that to complete it in the end. If anyone can help, I appreciate it!

Almost forgot to share these. Prior to the more familiar black-and-white maps we all know, the Zork Users Group released a set of illustrated maps. Structurally they're identical (which was great news, as I'd already recreated the actual map part) but with tons of great hand-drawn illustrations added.

These were recreated in much the same way as my earlier maps. At the download link there's a clean, vector-based PDF version, as well as versions with colour and texture applied to match the originals.

Google Drive downloads are HERE, or you can find them on my website, Gnusto.au

Hey all.

I've managed to secure myself a set of Zork 1-3 Grey Box releases for the Atari 800. They're shipping from overseas, so it'll be a little while before I actually get my hands on them.

For those of you who own Grey Box releases, here's my question: are the combined feelie/manual items:

• The Great Underground Empire: A History / Game Manual (Zork 1)
• G.U.E. On 9 Zorkmids a Day / Game Manual (Zork 2)
• FrobozzCo Annual Report / Game Manual (Zork 3)

...actually attached inside the front flap of the game box? I've realised that the images on the ebay auction never actually showed the FrobozzCo Annual Report, and I'm wondering if that's because it's not included, or simply because the seller didn't take a photo of the inside flap on that particular game. Other listings do make it appear like the booklets are physically stuck in.

Thanks in advance!

In working on Zork projects recently, I've had to do a lot of font identification for various logos and graphics. I figured it might be useful to share what I've learned.

All of the examples in this image are recreations I've made using the fonts mentioned below them (with the exception of the Personal Software Zork 1 logo, which was hand-traced).

If you have any further insight into any of these, I'd love to hear about it!