Game Review: Zork I (Amiga, Infocom)

Infocom’s range of text adventures were a thing of legend amongst anyone who played them. In the 8-bit era not many UK gamers were fortunate enough to experience them due to their expansive nature and need for a disk drive – my own experience of them didn’t come until I added a disk drive to my existing Commodore 64 set-up. So it wasn’t until the series was ported to 16 bit platforms that they found wider mainstream appeal. But how well did the first release, Zork, hold up several years after release when it finally made it to the Amiga?

Who Or What Is Zork?

Written by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling, Zork (or to use its full name Zork I: The Great Underground Empire) is a fantasy adventure where – according to the box at least – you’re on a perilous adventure deep below the earth seeking out the Treasures Of Zork located somewhere in the Great Empire. You’re not really given a great deal of information about where you are, what your overall goal is or anything else for that matter. You’re thrown right in at the deep end and left to figure everything out for yourself.

Where Are The Graphics?

Even during the early days of text adventures many were presenting games with brief text descriptions accompanied with simplistic visuals of the locations. In contrast, Infocom opted for a text only approach for Zork and all of their early releases. This allowed for lengthier descriptions for all the locations and also ensured that their games could be converted to run on more platforms with relative ease with no worried about converting or omitting visuals for any single format.

While the games were still too large to run from cassette for the 8-bit platforms, this approach also allowed them to be truly innovate as a developer and set themselves apart from the competition…

Playing The Game

As I mentioned, this was the first release from Infocom and it revolutionised the text adventure genre. Instead of one or two words, Zork allowed players to enter commands in complex sentences, giving multiple instructions at the same time. Not only does this allow for more complex gameplay, but also allowed for a more fluid experience. Imagine you wanted to pick up a book in any other game and you’d use the commands GET BOOK followed by EXAMINE BOOK. Here you’d just type GET BOOK AND EXAMINE IT. It may not seem like a big deal, but it made play feel so much more natural.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. It also allows Zork to distinguish between different objects so you can have different coloured objects and describe them as such when interacting with them. The scope really became limitless and instead of fighting with the interpreter you could just focus on playing and enjoying the game.

Getting Started

So once the game has started, you find yourself outside a house and to be honest, I did have some initial doubts about Zork at this point. With no information on where I could go (most will tell you what routes are available) and the description informing me of a building I can’t enter, it was only guesswork that allowed me to go anywhere else. Once I had moved on I found myself in a forest (after being in a field with no mention of any forests in view) and then the next couple of strange things happened…

Lost In The Woods…

At this point I found myself in a wooded area and there were birds chirping so I tried to listen to them only to be told that they had flew away. Nothing wrong with that, I thought. Wanting to check the location description again I used the LOOK command, only to see the birds mentioned once more!

But that wasn’t the only odd thing to happen in Zork at this part of the game. I walked West to get to the Forest, but walking East didn’t take me back to the house. Instead it took me somewhere completely different instead! I don’t mind an adventure that needs a little mapping exercise to help you find your way around, but when it feels as if the locations aren’t connected to each other properly it does lead to confusion.

Usually when playing an adventure for the first time having pen and paper to hand to map the game out helps, but when there’s no logic to the map it gets frustrating. There was one point during play when I wanted to go to a particular location but no matter what I tried I ended up going around in circles so I just tried entering directions at random and finally got where I needed to, but it felt more like luck than anything else.

A Challenging Quest

The most important aspect of any adventures is the puzzles themselves and Zork doesn’t disappoint. Unlike many other games I’ve played (and even some of Infocom’s others like Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), they’re fairly logical and even if you can’t work them out straight away, with a bit of thought or finding the right item later on you’ll work most of them out before too long.

That made playing the game challenging, but enjoyable so it was never frustrating – or at least not where the puzzles were concerned. The only thing that I did find irritating was the mapping of the game as I mentioned, but this was something I quickly got over. One example (without giving too much away) is when you encounter a pile of leaves in the forest. There’s something hidden underneath them but you can’t pick them up or move them… but as a kid if you ever saw a pile like that on the ground the temptation was always there to kick them. Problem solved!

Box Clever

Normally when you buy a budget re-release of any game, you don’t expect much to the packaging apart from the disk and a functional instruction leaflet at best. But this release of Zork goes out of its way to impress. Inside the slim package is a comprehensive manual that not only gives information on how to play the game, but lists of some of the key commands and the more advanced features of the parser.

On top of that is a poster of the game’s world map although the locations are labelled in the game’s own language so they’re impossible to read. A nice touch to see included in the package though even if it seems to have no real relevance to the game itself.

Presentation

As with all the early Infocom releases for the Amiga, Zork is quite system friendly both in terms of memory requirements and the versions of Kickstart that it will run on. The downside here is that this has a dramatic effect on the game’s presentation as it opens in a default Amiga window rather than a completely separate screen as the other versions of the game do. The text is in the main part of the window with a status bar at the top displaying your location, score and number of moves taken.

Running this on a Kickstart 2.04 system displays in the familar grey screen with black text. In contrast, if you use Kickstart 1.2/1.3 then it will be white text on a blue background. Frankly, neither of them are a particularly good choice in terms of contrast for lengthy periods of time and the windowed approach looks unprofessional for a commercial game. I would have expected this to run in full screen mode as has every other version of the game I’ve played to-date.

Those issues aside, Zork doesn’t need anything else for the presentation and it works well enough without any graphics as well (as I mentioned at the beginning) and the descriptions for each location are well written so it’s left to your imagination to fill in the blanks.

It’s also played in complete silence with no music, or sound effects to distract you and with the text being incredibly easy on the eye you can just focus on the gameplay and story and get drawn into the game as the author intended.

Overall

As with all text adventures, you do need to put a bit of time into Zork to get used to the game system (and to adjust to its quirks), but once you get past all of that you’ll find yourself hooked into an engaging tale packed with challenging but rewarding puzzles and you’ll lose all track of time while you’re playing. It’s no longer the greatest text adventure ever written, but it still manages to hold up well and is a solid game worthy of anyone’s time and attention.

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