It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten...

by a grue!

I don't normally wear geeky t-shirts. Well, if you don't count NY Mets gear as geeky, that is.

I mean, I don't have a DC Comics T shirt like Avery had at ConnCon, etc. Not that I don't love DC comics.

But I got a T-Shirt in the mail today from my best friend growing up. We used to play Zork at my Atari 800 computer (with phone modem). Man, that was a blast!

The shirt is a plain black one and all it has on it is an old style computer font saying "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue".

I am definitely wearing it to Averyfest in June!


Is it only nostalgia, though, to believe that the Zork games (and other Infocom games) were that good? Does anyone else think they still hold up--even without the images? That I haven't played enough newer games (I've played Oblivion IV, for example, with my son but it doesn't feel the same or as challenging as the Zork games.

/open mailbox

No, it's not nostaligic to believe the Zork games were good. They were very much D&D except you had your own DM and it was your frickin' computer! Your imagination exploded as you got very shoddy details of your surroundings and had to imagine everything in your head. It was very exciting.

They hid a version of Zork inside CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS if you want to relive it.


Oblivion is MUCH easier because the visual and sound is all done for you. You can SEE which ways to go and what to do instead of your mind having to build the entire scenario in your head. I obviously think Oblivion is a far better game cuz it's truly immersive but it's also a very different game. Zork was very much a heavy RPG because you had to really put yourself into that role to be successful in the game.

Great, now I have that song stuck in my head.

Chapel wrote:

Great, now I have that song stuck in my head.

This predicament sounds particularly cruel, but consider who's fault it could be.

I'm a huge fan of Infocom, and I played Interactive Fiction (IF) games all through high school.

In fact, I wrote and programmed a couple of freeware IF games in the late '90s:

www.wurb.com/if/game/163

www.wurb.com/if/game/312

Hopefully the Mac and PC versions still work on current OS's. As of a few years ago, at least, they still worked.

Fun fact:

I first met Kevin Wilson in his pre-board game days, when he was writing IF himself. At the time, he was working on Once and Future - I think.

Thanks for making me feel young.

Pleasure's all mine. Though I hope I'm not the oldest coot on F:AT.

Is it only nostalgia, though, to believe that the Zork games (and other Infocom games) were that good? Does anyone else think they still hold up--even without the images? That I haven't played enough newer games (I've played Oblivion IV, for example, with my son but it doesn't feel the same or as challenging as the Zork games.

Paul, It is too bad you couldn't hang around another day at ConnCon. The next day we played "Action Castle 2" which is a wierd little game where one person is the Zork GM and the other players take turns entering commands into the computer.

I'll get a hold of a copy for Trashfest. Each adventure can only be played once but they all have that same zork humor. You've got to the get the commands right or the computer (gm) gives you maddenly frustrating answers: "I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that", "I'm sorry, I don't understand that word.", "I'm sorry, Screaming for help, does nothing. You are tied up and on fire, what would you like to do?"

The whole thing reminded me of my beloved sessions of Paranoia- when I would dick the players over in mind bendingly creative ways.

memento-mori.com/online-store/parsely-games/action-castle/

Steve"You don't know how to use stick"Avery

wkover wrote:

Pleasure's all mine. Though I hope I'm not the oldest coot on F:AT.

There's always Southernman.

My student worker had a (knockoff recent) Infocom shirt. I'm not he'd ever actually seen one of their games, though. I played most of them on my old Apple //c.

Not Sure wrote:

wkover wrote:

Pleasure's all mine. Though I hope I'm not the oldest coot on F:AT.

There's always Southernman.

My student worker had a (knockoff recent) Infocom shirt. I'm not he'd ever actually seen one of their games, though. I played most of them on my old Apple //c.

Gruff bastard does not equal old !!

Southernman wrote:

Gruff bastard does not equal old !!

But "old gruff bastard" pretty much covers it, right? The two things are hardly exclusive...

Barney---you are wonderful--I had NO idea that it was in there. But it is hard to type on a game pad...that's what's tough. I passed this along to my old high school buddy and his son immediately found it.

Amazingly, the 13 year old kid is having a blast playing Zork--more than Black Ops that he had gotten tired of....even trying to kill a damn Orc. And it is exactly what you said, Barney. Right on.

Steve: DAMN---I would have LOVED that!

I remember playing Zork for the first time on an old Apple II, I believe.

Then later on the Commodore 64/128 someone gave me a pirated floppy that had several of them on one disk.

The best part were their ads in Family Computing and stuff. The one I remember most was the frazzled looking nerd clutching an Atari joystick, with the caption, "I was a Teenaged Zombie."

I wasn't as big into them as I was games with graphics (I guess I was a teenaged zombie, lol) but I did mess around with Hitchhiker's Guide quite a bit. Holy crap was that game impossible for me without some sort of hint system. Just getting to the part where you get a Babel Fish was ridiculous. And it deviated from the book a lot, so you couldn't solve it just by going by the novel, except the very first part of it where Arthur lays down in front of the bulldozer. Even then, you could goof around and not figure it out and boom, you're destroyed to make way for a hypergalactic bypass.


Zork tried to make the leap into the graphical world later, but I don't remember those titles having much of an impact. Did anyone play those later games?


The funniest part is trying to imagine telling a teenager now that "yes, this game was all text." "Uh...what??!?"

Merkles wrote:

Amazingly, the 13 year old kid is having a blast playing Zork--more than Black Ops that he had gotten tired of....even trying to kill a damn Orc. And it is exactly what you said, Barney. Right on.

That is amazing that he is interested in it. Like Ken said, i always assumed modern-day gamers would not want anything to do with Zork and such because of the lower immersion, but there you have it! So cool that he likes it. If you have the XboxLive Messenger Pad, you can learn to type pretty quickly and that might work for Zork (not sure tho). So cool that he likes Zork, wow.

A: Steve. I have Action Castle, and a couple of the other add-ons.

B: Rick Thornquist has been working for like 2 years on a thorough book and companion DVD about Infocom. Tons of interviews with designers, historical notes. He's close to having complete versions, but I haven't seen a publisher's date yet.

C: You haven't really lived until you've had tea and no tea and 4 types of pocket lint.