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Zork Zero

29 Apr

Zork Zero

Zork Zero the idea was kicking around Infocom for quite a long time before Zork Zero the game was finally realized. Steve Meretzky first proposed making a prequel to the original Zork trilogy as far back as 1985, when he included it on a list of possible next games that he might write after finishing his personal passion project of A Mind Forever Voyaging. The Zork Zero he described at that time not only already had the name but the vast majority of the concept of the eventual finished game as well.

As the name implies, a prequel to the Zork trilogy. It would be set in the Great Underground Empire, and covering a long period of time, from the end of the reign of Dimwit Flathead in 789 through the fall of the GUE in 883, and possibly through 948 (the year of the Zork trilogy). It would almost certainly end “west of a white house.” There would be some story, probably about as much as Enchanter or Sorcerer. For the most part, though, it would be an intensely puzzle-oriented game with a huge geography.

The fact that Meretzky knew in what years Dimwit Flathead died, the Great Underground Empire fell, and Zork I began says much about his role as the unofficial keeper of Zorkian lore at Infocom. He had already filled a huge notebook with similarly nitpicky legends and lore. This endeavor was viewed by most of the other Imps, who thought of the likes of Dimwit Flathead as no more than spur-of-the-moment jokes, with bemused and gently mocking disinterest. Still, if Infocom was going to do a big, at least semi-earnest Zork game, his obsessiveness about the milieu made Meretzky the obvious candidate for the job.

But that big Zork game didn’t get made in 1985, partly because the other Imps remained very reluctant to sacrifice any real or perceived artistic credibility by trading on the old name and partly because the same list of possible next projects included a little something called Leather Goddesses of Phobos that everyone, from the Imps to the marketers to the businesspeople, absolutely loved. Brian Moriarty’s reaction was typical: “If you don’t do this, I will. But not as well as you could.”

After Meretzky completed Leather Goddesses the following year, Zork Zero turned up again on his next list of possible next projects. This time it was granted more serious consideration; Infocom’s clear and pressing need for hits by that point had done much to diminish the Imps’ artistic fickleness. At the same time, though, Brian Moriarty also was shopping a pretty good proposal for a Zork game, one that would include elements of the CRPGs that seemed to be replacing adventure games in some players’ hearts. Meanwhile Meretzky’s own list included something called Stationfall, the long-awaited sequel to one of the most beloved games in Infocom’s back catalog. While Moriarty seemed perfectly capable of pulling off a perfectly acceptable Zork, the universe of Planetfall, and particularly the lovable little robot Floyd, were obviously Meretzky’s babies and Meretzky’s alone. Given Infocom’s commercial plight, management’s choice between reviving two classic titles or just one was really no choice at all. Meretzky did Stationfall, and Moriarty did Beyond Zork — with, it should be noted, the invaluable assistance of Meretzky’s oft-mocked book of Zorkian lore.

And then it was 1987, Stationfall too was finished, and there was Zork Zero on yet another list of possible next projects. I’ll be honest in stating that plenty of the other project possibilities found on the 1987 list, some of which had been appearing on these lists as long as Zork Zero, sound much more interesting to this writer. There was, for instance, Superhero League of America, an idea for a comedic superhero game with “possible RPG elements” that would years later be dusted off by Meretzky to become the delightful Legend Entertainment release Superhero League of Hoboken. There was a serious historical epic taking place on the Titanic that begs to be described as Meretzky’s Trinity. And there was something with the working title of The Best of Stevo, a collection of interactive vignettes in the form if not the style of Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It.

Mind you, not all of the other projects were winners. A heavy-handed satire to be called The Interactive Bible, described by Meretzky as “part of my ongoing attempt to offend every person in the universe,” was eloquently and justifiably lacerated by Moriarty.

As you noted, this game is likely to offend many people, and not just frothing nutcakes either. A surprising number of reasonable people regard the Book with reverence. They are likely to regard your send-up as superficial and juvenile. They will wonder what qualifies you to poke fun at their (or anybody’s) faith. Why do you want to write this? Do you really think it will sell?

If Zork Zero wasn’t at the bottom of anyone’s list like The Interactive Bible, no one was exactly burning with passion to make it either. Few found the idea of going back to the well of Zork yet again all that interesting in creative terms, especially as Beyond Zork was itself still very much an ongoing project some weeks from release. The idea’s trump card, however, was the unique commercial appeal most still believed the Zork trademark to possess. Jon Palace’s faint praise was typical: “I’m sure this would sell very well. It’s certainly ‘safe.'” By 1987, the commercially safe route was increasingly being seen as the only viable route within Infocom, at least until they could manage to scare up a few hits. A final tally revealed that Zork Zero had scored an average of 7.2 among “next Meretzky project” voters on a scale of 1 to 10, edging out Superhero League of America by one tenth of a point, Titanic by two tenths, and The Best of Stevo by one full point; the last was very well-liked in the abstract, but its standing was damaged by the fact that, unusually for Meretzky, the exact form the vignettes would take wasn’t very well specified.

On August 7, 1987, it was decided provisionally to have Meretzky do Zork Zero next. In a demonstration of how tepid everyone’s enthusiasm remained for such a safe, unchallenging game, an addendum was included with the announcement: “I think it is fair to add that if Steve happens to have a flash of creativity in the next few days and thinks of some more ideas for his experimental story project (Best of Stevo), nearly everyone in this group would prefer that he do that product.” That flash apparently didn’t come; The Best of Stevo was never heard of again. Also forgotten in the rush to do Zork Zero was the idea, mooted in Beyond Zork, of Zork becoming a series of CRPG/text-adventure hybrids, with the player able to import the same character into each successive game. Zork Zero would instead be a simple standalone text adventure again.

While it’s doubtful whether many at Infocom ever warmed all that much to Zork Zero as a creative exercise, the cavalcade of commercial disappointments that was 1987 tempted many to see it as the latest and greatest of their Great White Hopes for a return to the bestseller charts. It was thus decided that it should become the first game to use Infocom’s new version 6 Z-Machine, usually called “YZIP” internally. Running on Macintosh II microcomputers rather than the faithful old DEC, the YZIP system would at last support proper bitmap illustrations and other graphics, along with support for mice, sound and music, far more flexible screen layouts, and yet bigger stories over even what the EZIP system (known publicly as Interactive Fiction Plus) had offered. With YZIP still in the early stages of development, Meretzky would first write Zork Zero the old way, on the DEC. Then, when YZIP was ready, the source code could be moved over and the new graphical bells and whistles added; the new version of ZIL was designed to be source-compatible with the old. In the meantime, Stu Galley was working on a ground-up rewrite of the parser, which was itself written in ZIL. At some magic moment, the three pieces would all come together, and just like that Infocom would be reborn with pictures and a friendlier parser and lots of other goodies, all attached to the legendary Zork name and written by Infocom’s most popular and recognizable author. That, anyway, was the theory.

Being at the confluence of so much that was new and different, Zork Zero became one of the more tortured projects in Infocom’s history, almost up there with the legendarily tortured Bureaucracy project. None of the problems, however, were down to Meretzky. Working quickly and efficiently as always, his progress on the core of the game proper far outstripped the technology enabling most of the ancillary bells and whistles. While Stu Galley’s new parser went in on November 1, 1987, it wasn’t until the following May 10 that a YZIP Zork Zero was compiled for the first time.

In sourcing graphics for Zork Zero, Infocom was on completely foreign territory. Following the lead of much of the computer-game industry, all of the graphics were to be created on Amigas, whose Deluxe Paint application was so much better than anything available on any other platform that plenty of artists simply refused to use anything else. Jon Palace found Jim Shook, the artist who would do most of the illustrations for Zork Zero, at a local Amiga users-group meeting. Reading some of the memos and meeting notes from this period, it’s hard to avoid the impression that — being painfully blunt here — nobody at Infocom entirely knew what they were doing when it came to graphics. As of February of 1988, they still hadn’t even figured out what resolution Shook should be working in. “We still don’t know whether images should be drawn in low-res, medium-res, interlace, or high-res mode on the Amiga in Deluxe Paint,” wrote Palace plaintively in one memo. “Joel claims Tim should know. Tim, do you know?”

Infocom wound up turning to Magnetic Scrolls, who had been putting pictures into their own text adventures for quite some time, for information on “graphics compression techniques,” a move that couldn’t have sat very well with such a proud group of programmers. The graphics would continue to be a constant time sink and headache for many months to come. Steve Meretzky told me that he remembers the development of Zork Zero primarily as “heinous endless futzing with the graphics, mostly on an Amiga, to make them work with all the different screen resolutions, number of colors, pixel aspect ratios, etc. In my memory, it feels like I spent way more time doing that than actually designing puzzles or writing ZIL code.”

Zork Zero uses graphics more often to present the look of an illuminated manuscript than for traditional illustrations.

Zork Zero uses graphics more often to present the look of an illuminated manuscript than for traditional illustrations.

And yet in comparison to games like those of Magnetic Scrolls, the finished Zork Zero really wouldn’t have a lot of graphics. Instead of an illustration for each room, the graphics take the form of decorative borders, an illuminated onscreen map, some graphical puzzles (solvable using a mouse), and only a few illustrations for illustrations’ sake. Infocom would advertise that they wanted to use graphics in “a new way” for Zork Zero — read, more thoughtfully, giving them some actual purpose rather than just using them for atmosphere. All of which is fair enough, but one suspects that money was a factor as well; memos from the period show Infocom nickel-and-diming the whole process, fretting over artist fees of a handful of thousand dollars that a healthier developer wouldn’t have thought twice about.

The financial squeeze also spelled the end of Infocom’s hopes for a full soundtrack, to have been composed by Russell Lieblich at Mediagenic, who had earlier done the sound effects for The Lurking Horror and Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels. But the music never happened; when Zork Zero finally shipped, it would be entirely silent apart from a warning beep here or an acknowledging bloop there.

Hemorrhaging personnel as they were by this point, Infocom found themselves in a mad scramble to get all the pieces that did wind up making it into Zork Zero together in time for Christmas 1988, months after they had originally hoped to ship the game. Bruce Davis grew ever more frustrated and irate at the delays; a contemporary memo calls him a “looming personality” and notes how he is forever “threatening a tantrum.” A desperate-sounding “Proclamation” went out to the rank-and-file around the same time: “The one who can fix the bugs of Zork Zero, and save the schedule from destruction, shall be rewarded with half the wealth of the Empire.” Signed: “Wurb Flathead, King of Quendor.”

Like a number of Zork Zero's illustrations, this one actually conveys some important information about the state of the game.

Like a number of Zork Zero‘s illustrations, this one actually conveys some important information about the state of the game rather than being only for show.

Time constraints, the fact that the beta builds ran only on the Macintosh, and Infocom’s determination to test Zork Zero primarily using new testers unfamiliar with interactive fiction meant that it didn’t receive anywhere near the quantity or quality of outside feedback that had long been customary for their games. Many of the new testers seemed bemused if not confused by the experience, and few came anywhere close to finishing the game. I fancy that one can feel the relative lack of external feedback in the end result, as one can the loss of key voices from within Infocom like longtime producer Jon Palace and senior tester Liz Cyr-Jones.

Despite the corner-cutting, Infocom largely missed even the revised target of Christmas 1988. Only the Macintosh version shipped in time for the holiday buying season, the huge job of porting the complicated new YZIP interpreter to other platforms having barely begun by that time. Zork Zero was quite well-received by the Macintosh magazines, but that platform was far from the commercial sweet spot in gaming.

The decorative borders change as you enter difference regions -- a nice touch.

A nice touch: the decorative borders change as you enter different regions.

A sort of cognitive dissonance was a thoroughgoing theme of the Zork Zero project from beginning to end. It’s right there in marketing’s core pitch: “Zork Zero is the beginning of something old (the Zork trilogy) and something new (new format with graphics).” Unable to decide whether commercial success lay in looking forward or looking back, Infocom tried to have it both ways. Zork Zero‘s “target audience,” declared marketing, would be “primarily those who are not Infocom fans; either they have never tried interactive fiction or they have lost interest in Infocom.” The game would appeal to them thanks to “a mouse interface (enabling the player to move via compass rose), onscreen hints, a new parser (to help novices), and pretty pictures that will knock your socks off!”

Yet all the gilding around the edges couldn’t obscure the fact that Zork Zero was at heart the most old-school game Infocom had made since… well, since Zork I really. That, anyway, was the last game they had made that was so blatantly a treasure hunt and nothing more. Zork Zero‘s dynamic dozen-turn introduction lays out the reasons behind the static treasure hunt that will absorb the next several thousand turns. To thwart a 94-year-old curse that threatens to bring ruin to the Great Underground Empire, you must assemble 24 heirlooms that once belonged to 12 members of the Flathead dynasty and drop them in a cauldron. Zork Zero is, it must be emphasized, a big game, far bigger than any other that Infocom ever released, its sprawling geography of more than 200 rooms — more than 2200 if you count a certain building of 400 (nearly) identical floors —  housing scores of individual puzzles. The obvious point of comparison is not so much Infocom’s Zork trilogy as the original original Zork, the one put together by a bunch of hackers at MIT in response to the original Adventure back in the late 1970s, long before Infocom was so much as a gleam in anyone’s eye.

A Tower of Hanoi puzzle, one of the hoariest of Zork Zero's tired old chestnuts.

A Tower of Hanoi puzzle, one of the hoariest of Zork Zero‘s hoary old chestnuts.

The question — the answer to which must always to some extent be idiosyncratic to each player — is whether Zork Zero works for you on those terms. In my case, it doesn’t. The PDP-10 Zork is confusing and obscure and often deeply unfair, but it carries with it a certain joyous sense of possibility, of the discovery of a whole new creative medium, that we can enjoy vicariously with its creators. Zork Zero perhaps also echos the emotional circumstances of its creation: it just feels tired, and often cranky and mean-spirited to boot. Having agreed to make a huge game full of lots of puzzles, Meretzky dutifully provides, but the old magic is conspicuously absent.

Infocom always kept a library of puzzly resources around the office to inspire the Imps: books of paradoxes and mathematical conundrums, back issues of Games magazine, physical toys and puzzles of all descriptions. But for the first time with Zork Zero, Meretzky seems not so much inspired by these resources as simply cribbing from them. Lots of the puzzles in Zork Zero are slavish re-creations of the classics: riddles, a Tower of Hanoi puzzle, a peg game. Even the old chestnut about the river, the fox, the chicken, and the sack of grain makes an appearance. And even some of the better bits, like a pair of objects that let you teleport from the location of one to that of another, are derivative of older, better Infocom games like Starcross and Spellbreaker. One other, more hidden influence on Zork Zero‘s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to puzzle design — particularly on the occasional graphical puzzles — is likely Cliff Johnson’s puzzling classic The Fool’s Errand, which Meretzky was playing with some dedication at the very time he was designing his own latest game. The Fool’s Errand‘s puzzles, however, are both more compelling and more original than Zork Zero‘s. Meretzky’s later Hodj ‘n’ Podj would prove a far more worthy tribute.

Zork Zero is a difficult game, and too often difficult in ways that really aren’t that much fun. I’m a fan of big, complicated puzzlefests in the abstract, but Zork Zero‘s approach to the form doesn’t thrill me. After the brief introductory sequence, the game exposes almost the whole of its immense geography to you almost immediately; there’s nothing for it but to start wandering and trying to solve puzzles. The combinatorial explosion is enormous. And even when you begin to solve some of the puzzles, the process can be made weirdly unsatisfying by the treasure-hunt structure. Too much of the time, making what at first feels like a significant step forward only yields another object to throw into the cauldron for some more points. You know intellectually that you’re making progress, but it doesn’t really feel like it.

I much prefer the approach of later huge puzzlefests like Curses! and The Mulldoon Legacy, which start you in a constrained space and gradually expand in scope as you solve puzzles. By limiting their initial scope, these games ease you into their worlds and limit the sense of hopeless aimlessness that Zork Zero inspires, while a new set of rooms to explore provides a far more tangible and satisfying reward for solving a puzzle sequence than does another object chunked in the cauldron and another few points. The later games feel holistically designed, Zork Zero like something that was just added to until the author ran out of space. Even The Fool’s Errand restricts you to a handful of puzzles at the beginning, unfolding its mysteries and its grand interconnections only gradually as you burrow ever deeper. That Infocom of all people — Steve Meretzky of all people, whose Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Stationfall are some of the most airtight designs in Infocom’s catalog — is suddenly embracing the design aesthetic of the 1970s is downright weird for a game that was supposed to herald a bright new future of more playable and player-friendly interactive fiction.

The in-game Encyclopedia Frobozzica is a nice if somewhat underused feature. The encyclopedia could have provided nudges for some more of the more obscure puzzles and maybe even some direction as to what to be working on next. Instead that work is all shuffled off to the hint system.

The in-game Encyclopedia Frobozzica is a nice but rather underused feature. The encyclopedia could have provided more nudges for some more of the more obscure puzzles and maybe even some direction as to what to be working on next. Instead that work is all shuffled off to the hint menu, the use of which feels like giving up or even cheating.

The puzzles rely on the feelies more extensively than any other Infocom game, often requiring you to make connections with seemingly tossed-off anecdotes buried deep within “The Flathead Calendar.” I generally don’t mind this sort of thing overmuch, but, like so much else in Zork Zero, it feels overdone here. These puzzles feel like they have far more to do with copy protection than the player’s enjoyment — but then much of the time Zork Zero seems very little concerned with the player’s enjoyment.

I love the headline of the single review of Zork Zero that’s to be found as of this writing on The Interactive Fiction Database: “Enough is enough!” That’s my own feeling when trying to get through this exhausting slog of a game. As if the sheer scope and aimlessness of the thing don’t frustrate enough, Meretzky actively goes out of his way to annoy you. There is, for instance, a magic wand with barely enough charges in it; waste a few charges in experimentation, and, boom, you’re locked out of victory. There’s that aforementioned building of 400 floors, all but one of them empty, which the diligent player will nevertheless feel the need to explore floor by floor, just in case there’s something else there; this is, after all, just the type of game to hide something essential on,say, floor 383. And then there’s the most annoying character in an Infocom game this side of Zork I‘s thief, a jester who teleports in every few dozen turns to do some random thing to you, like stick a clown nose over your own (you have to take it off within a certain number of turns or you’ll suffocate) or turn you into an alligator (you have to waste a few turns getting yourself turned back, then deal with picking up all of your possessions off the ground, putting those things you were wearing back on, etc.). Some of these gags are amusing the first time they happen, but they wear out their welcome quickly when they just keep wasting your time over a game that will already require thousands of moves to finish. The jester’s worst trick of all is to teleport you somewhere else in the game’s sprawling geography; you can be hopelessly trapped, locked out of victory through absolutely no fault of your own, if you’re unlucky and don’t have the right transportation handy. Hilariously, Infocom’s marketing people, looking always for an angle, hit upon selling the jester as Meretzky’s latest lovable sidekick, “every bit as enjoyable and memorable as Floyd of Planetfall fame.” Meretzky himself walked them back from that idea.

Some of the puzzles, probably even most of them, are fine enough in themselves, but there is a sprinkling of questionable ones, and all are made immeasurably more difficult by the fact that trying out a burst of inspiration can absorb 50 moves simply transiting from one side of the world to the other. Throw in a sharply limited inventory, which means you might need to make three or four round trips just to try out all the possible solutions you can think of, and things get even more fun. Graham Nelson among others has made much of the idea that the 128 K limitation of the original Z-Machine was actually a hidden benefit, forcing authors to hone their creations down to only what needed to be there and nothing that didn’t. I’ve generally been a little skeptical of that position; there are any number of good Infocom games that feel like they might have been still a little better with just a little more room to breathe. Zork Zero, however, makes as compelling a case as one can imagine for the idea that less is often more in interactive fiction, that constraints can lead to better designs.

The in-game mapping is handy from time to time, but, split into many different regions and viewable only by typing “MAP” from the main screen as it is, is not really ideal. A serious player is likely to be back to pencil and paper (or, these days, Trizbort) pretty quickly.

Which is actually not to say that Meretzky was operating totally unfettered by space constraints. While the YZIP format theoretically allowed a story size of up to 512 K not including graphics, the limitations of Infocom’s least-common-denominator platform, the Apple II, meant that the practical limit was around 340 K, a fairly modest expansion on the old 256 K EZIP and XZIP formats used for the Interactive Fiction Plus line. But still more restrictive was the limitation on the size of what Infocom called the “pre-load,” that part of the story data that could change as the player played, and that thus needed to always be in the host machine’s memory. The pre-load had to be held under about 55 K. Undoubtedly due in part to these restrictions, Zork Zero clearly sacrifices depth for breadth in comparison to many Infocom games that preceded it. The “examine” command suffers badly, some of the responses coming off like oxymorons: “totally ordinary looking writhing mass of snakes”; “totally ordinary looking herd of unicorns.” The sketchy implementation only adds to the throwback feel of the game as a whole.

The hints are certainly nice to have given the complexity and scope of the game, but they unfortunately aren’t context-sensitive. It’s all too easy to accidentally read the wrong one when trying to sort through this jumble.

Another subtle hidden enemy of Zork Zero as a design is the online hint system. Installed with the best of intentions in this as well as a few earlier Infocom games, it could easily lead to creeping laziness on the part of a game’s Implementor. “If the player really gets stuck, she can always turn to the hints,” ran the logic — thus no need to fret to quite the same extent over issues of solubility. The problem with that logic is that no one likes to turn to hints, whether found in the game itself, in a separate InvisiClues booklet, or in an online walkthrough. People play games like Zork Zero to solve them themselves, and the presence of a single bad puzzle remains ruinous to their experience as a whole even if they can look up the answer in the game itself. Infocom’s claim that “the onscreen hints help you through the rough spots without spoiling the story” doesn’t hold much water when one considers that Zork Zero doesn’t really have any story to speak of.

More puzzling is the impact — or rather lack thereof — of Stu Galley’s much-vaunted new parser. Despite being a ground-up rewrite using “an ATN algorithm with an LALR grammar and one-token look-ahead,” whatever that means, it doesn’t feel qualitatively different from those found in earlier Infocom games. The only obvious addition is the alleged ability to notice when you’re having trouble getting your commands across, and to start offering sample commands and other suggestions. A nice idea in theory, but the parser mostly seems to decide to become helpful and start pestering you with questions when you’re typing random possible answers to one of the game’s inane riddles. Like your racist uncle who decides to help you clean up after regaling you with his anecdotes over the Thanksgiving dinner table, even when Zork Zero tries to be helpful it’s annoying. Nowhere is the cognitive dissonance of Zork Zero more plainly highlighted than in the juxtaposition of this overly helpful, newbie-friendly parser with the old-school player hostility of the actual game design. “Zork hates its player,” wrote Robb Sherwin once of the game that made Infocom. After spending years evolving interactive fiction into something more positive and interesting than that old-school player hostility, Infocom incomprehensibly decided to circle back to how it all began with Zork Zero.

The most rewarding moment comes right at the end — and no, not because you’re finally done with the thing, although that’s certainly a factor too. In the end, you wind up right where it all began for Zork and for Infocom, before the famous white house, about to assume the role of the Dungeon Master, the antagonist of the original trilogy. There’s a melancholy resonance to the ending given the history not just of the Great Underground Empire but of Infocom in our own world. Released on July 14, 1989, the MS-DOS version of Zork Zero — the version that most of its few buyers would opt for — was one of the last two Infocom games to ship. So, the very end for Infocom circles back to the very beginning in many ways. Whether getting there is worth the trouble is of course another question.

As the belated date of the MS-DOS release will attest, versions of Zork Zero for the more important game-playing platforms were very slow in coming. The Amiga version didn’t ship until March of 1989, the Apple II version in June, followed finally by that MS-DOS version — the most important of all, oddly left for last. By that time Bruce Davis had lost patience, and Infocom had ceased to exist as anything other than a Mediagenic brand. The story of Zork Zero‘s failure to save Infocom thus isn’t so much the story of its commercial failure — although, make no mistake, it was a commercial failure — as the story of Infocom’s failure to just get the thing finished in time to even give it a chance of making a difference. Already an orphaned afterthought by the time it appeared on the platform that mattered most, Zork Zero likely never managed to sell even 10,000 copies in total. So much for Infocom’s “new look, new challenge, new beginning.”

We have a few more such afterthoughts to discuss before we pull the curtain at last on the story of Infocom, that most detailed and extended of all the stories I’ve told so far on this blog. Now, however, it’s time to check in with Infocom’s counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic, with the other two of the three remaining companies in the English-speaking world still trying to make a living out of text adventures in 1988. As you have probably guessed, things weren’t working out all that much better for either of them than they were for Infocom. Yet amidst the same old commercial problems, there are still some interesting and worthy games to discuss. So, we’ll start to do just that next time.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Much of it is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Magazine sources include Questbusters of March 1989, The Games Machine of October 1989, and the Spring 1989 issue of Infocom’s The Status Line newsletter. Huge thanks also to Tim Anderson and Steve Meretzky for corresponding with me about some of the details of this period.

If you still want to play Zork Zero after the thrashing I’ve just given it — sorry, Steve and all Zork Zero fans! — you can purchase it from GOG.com as part of The Zork Anthology.)

 
 

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42 Responses to Zork Zero

  1. Steven Marsh

    April 29, 2016 at 1:53 pm

    Interesting read, as ever; thanks!

    I’m a bit more sympathetic to this game than you are, although I admit I haven’t played it all the way through in many years.

    One of the things I most appreciated about it – when I was 15 – is that it was so discrete; I could play for a few hours and feel fairly confident that I was 1) making progress, and 2) having some kind of satisfying game experience. Since there wasn’t a time limit (or food or other limited resource) and fairly hard to get locked out, I could feel confident that any puzzles I solved actually WERE solved.

    That wasn’t the case with many (most?) Infocom games. Hitchhiker’s Guide kept feeling (correctly) like it was trying to punish you for the slightest misstep. The three classic mysteries all felt like I could play for hours and not be any closer to “really” solving it. Even – as I recall – Arthur (which I enjoyed more as a story) had a time limit that was a bit stressful.

    I also didn’t mind the reuse of classic puzzles, because the game was so bleedin’ big that those felt like mental “breathers.” It’s like how a crossword puzzle with nothing but super-clever clues is pretty exhausting; you need the easy and common OREO and AJA answers to give you some easy mental “victories.” Plus – again – the game was so big that I never felt like those puzzles were crowding out other, more-interesting puzzles. Plus, if Infocom had continued, I felt like Zork Zero would have been a good line in the sand for nearly every classic type of puzzle: “We can never do a puzzle like [X] again, because we did that one in Zork Zero.”

    Zork Zero (as I played it on the Apple IIgs) is, perhaps, one of the classic examples of that “physicality” of the play experience. Deciding (foolishly) to climb to the top of the Tower took well over an hour on my Apple, as every few levels resulted in another ka-CHUNK ka-CHUNK of the 3.5″ drive spinning to life. In contrast, I played this recently and – thanks to macros – got to the top in a couple of minutes. It’s really hard to describe how different that original experience is; it’s not just slower. There was always a moment’s deliberation of, “Do I want to go poking around on the west side of the kingdom again? That’ll take some time…”

    This isn’t really an errata, but I’ll note that the “Apple II” version was actually for the IIe and IIc (or the IIgs in compatibility mode, as I played it); it also required two 5.25″ disk drives or one 3.5″ drive – both of which would have been rarer for the IIe. I mention it here because – although certainly necessary – that couldn’t have helped its sales. I imagine the primary audience for the game was IIc and IIgs owners, both of whom I imagine were smaller than the IIe userbase. (The IIgs was an ideal platform in the Apple realm, because it was zippier than the rest of the line.)

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      April 29, 2016 at 2:11 pm

      Thanks for this. Your comment serves as an always welcome reminder of the role that changing times and expectations play. If I was a kid with a long summer stretching out in front of me and only one new game to play, I’d quite possibly want it to be this one rather than something compact and completable like Leather Goddesses or Stationfall. As I’ve discussed a bit in relation to the 1980s Ultimas — some other games I don’t have overly high opinions of in terms of basic design — many players back in the day weren’t so much looking for a game to play as a world to inhabit for weeks or months at a stretch. Actually solving the whole thing might almost be a disappointment.

      I was also interested to learn that the Apple II version required either two disks or a 3.5″ drive. I’d wondered vaguely how Infocom fit a game of this size into the machine — getting the smaller A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity onto a single double-sided disk had been a huge challenge — but never got around to really looking into it. I do know that getting acceptable speed out of the YZIP interpreter on the Apple II sucked up a lot of time and effort.

       
    • Duncan Stevens

      April 30, 2016 at 1:21 am

      Since there wasn’t a time limit

      The message for SCORE after a certain number of moves was pretty funny. The game tells you how many turns you’ve taken, and adds, “The day really seems to be dragging, doesn’t it?”

      (Or maybe the command was TIME. Either way, it made me laugh.)

       
    • Steven Marsh

      May 7, 2016 at 12:47 am

      Not to reply to my own post, but I finally figured what modern games tap into that “physicality” I talked about. The Professor Layton games (and the Puzzle Agent games, which are pretty closely related) have this animation between when you submit an answer and when it tells you if that answer is correct. Obviously, with modern technology, these games could give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down immediately, but by making the player sweat for a moment, they heighten that thrill when the answer is correct (and, of course, amplify the stomach-sinking when it’s wrong). It’s not a perfect comparison, but there was an indescribable thrill when I would see the floppy disk drive lights flicker into action as it downloaded a new chunk of text because I did something correct (or noteworthy) on an Infocom game.

       
    • Nathanael

      March 6, 2021 at 1:25 pm

      I liked Zork Zero for exactly the same reason. Lots of gameplay (extend that dollar!), very few “you’ve locked yourself out of winning” things and none where you can’t tell, and lots of exploration.

      And the graphics are very relaxing.

      In fact, when I can get a Z-machine which handled the graphics correctly (running Linux, most of them don’t — I find myself running WinFrotz under Wine :-( ) Zork Zero is generally my go-to-Infocom game when I just want to noodle around in a Zorky world.

       
  2. Jayle Enn

    April 29, 2016 at 3:05 pm

    I enjoyed Zork Zero, but I think I enjoyed it in spite of the puzzles. There was just a… mean spiritedness to some of them, where a wrong answer forces a RESTORE or UNDO, but the feelies and the Encyclopedia were fun reads, and I enjoyed exploring that absurdly sprawling world.

    Jumping-peg puzzles should never be used as a roadblock in a game though. Good grief.

     
    • Lisa H.

      May 2, 2016 at 3:19 am

      Jumping-peg puzzles should never be used as a roadblock in a game though. Good grief.

      I heartily agree!

       
  3. TsuDhoNimh

    April 29, 2016 at 3:47 pm

    I remember Zork Zero (I also played the //gs version) mostly for how forgettable it was despite its length. Before I read the article, the only things I remembered about the game were the lazy reuse of old puzzles and (finally) getting to play Double Fanucci.

     
    • Alexander Freeman

      April 29, 2016 at 11:32 pm

      So you remember something because of how forgettable it was. Hmmm…

       
  4. Bob Reeves

    April 29, 2016 at 3:57 pm

    You’re fair as always, and make good points, but I loved this game the first time I played it and have continued to play it at least once every couple of years. I don’t know whether I’d have felt gypped otherwise, but Zork Zero was the first place I encountered ANY of the “hoary old chestnut” puzzles. I was a fan of the Zorkian mythology and also had been longing for a treasure-hunt experience comparable to the original Zork. (Hollywood Hijinx made me very happy.) The interlocking nature of the main puzzles, especially the regions beyond the Oracle and the bottom/top of the world, was exciting enough to make me feel I was understanding the structure of a rich universe, not just finding one more item to toss in the cauldron. Anyway, I suspect the game has other serious fans, and I just wanted to speak up for us.

     
    • Michael Russo

      April 29, 2016 at 5:28 pm

      Yep, I was quite young when I played it too, and hadn’t encountered these chestnuts either. The other items you mentioned, along with what Jimmy mentions above about enjoying a whole big world to explore to a long period of time, are really why I have fond memories of the game and why others enjoy it too despite the design mistakes.

       
  5. Pedro Timóteo

    April 29, 2016 at 5:05 pm

    Great as always! And I’ll really have to play this one someday (big queue before it, though).

    with the other two of the three remaining companies in the English-speaking world still trying to make a living out of text adventures in 1988

    Well, technically there was a fourth one, Zenobi Software, which would last for a lot longer than the other three. :) But, of course, I understand that it’s impossible for you to cover everything.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      April 29, 2016 at 6:13 pm

      I tried to cover myself. ;) I could be wrong, but I don’t have the impression that the Balrog ever actually made a living wage from Zenobi. There were a number of other small shareware and mail-order outfits, but, again, all moonlighting operations rather than companies with proper offices, employees, etc.

       
  6. Duncan Stevens

    April 30, 2016 at 1:48 am

    I didn’t dislike Zork Zero as much as you did. The wealth of funny responses to random actions helped overcome the annoyances, though I did roll my eyes at the borrowed puzzles. There were some pretty clever puzzles here and there, to be sure (my favorite involved the way you use the life-size chess pieces), but c’mon, measure-out-liquids-with-two-odd-size-containers, lady-or-the-tiger, Tower of Hanoi, Hi-Q…it was just too much.

    I also agree about the aimlessness, and the loss of pacing that results when most of the territory is available from the beginning of the game. I went back and reread a review I wrote about 20 years ago, which said, among other things:

    Given the amount of story underlying Zork Zero, it’s
    strange how little of it comes out in the game (until the finale, anyway); it doesn’t seem that it would have been impossible to discover interesting things about the Flatheads or about Megaboz that shape your quest and draw the player into finding out more. As it is, until the last few moves, what you see is largely what you get.

    …which I still think is a fair point. The game could have had some structure, and had it been written earlier, it might have had some. As you point out, Meretzky embraced the Flathead/GUE lore stuff, and it would have been easy enough to give the game some actual plot arising from it. I’m not saying it would have been a great game that way, but it would have been less of a slog.

    Also agree that the improvements in the parser are mostly invisible, though there are a bunch of scaled objects (large fly, larger fly, largest fly) that might not have worked with the earlier version of the parser.

    One other observation: there’s so much silliness in Zork Zero that it felt less like a Zork game than a pastiche. The general setting of the original trilogy was that of a decayed empire, with funny bits now and again to lighten the mood; Beyond Zork had a slightly different feel, but the melancholic element showed up here and there. It just doesn’t show up at all in Zork Zero, unless you count the very ending. The same is true, to some extent, of Sorcerer as compared to Enchanter and Spellbreaker, but it’s amplified here.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      April 30, 2016 at 7:05 am

      I actually had a paragraph or two at one point specifically about the writing, but I ended up cutting it because it didn’t feel all that relevant somehow but did feel like piling on with the criticism — and I felt that the article was getting a bit too long and shaggy anyway.

      But yeah, I agree with you. Lebling, Blank, and Moriarty all mixed windy grandeur with (generally) more subtle humor, whereas Meretzky in both Sorcerer and Zork Zero pretty much wrote slapstick comedy. This is kind of odd when we consider that Meretzky was actually the one who took the Zork milieu most seriously as a coherent setting, but so be it.

      At his best, Meretzky writes humor that first seems dumb but proves to be shot through with a lot of real cleverness and wit. As his worst… well, it just seems dumb. While not a disaster in the writing department, Zork Zero tends more toward the latter than the former for me. Like so much else in the game, the humor seems a little rote. But, again, there are so many more fundamental issues of design here that I decided not to keelhaul the game for that as well. More inspired writing wouldn’t have saved this one.

       
  7. Casey Muratori

    April 30, 2016 at 5:29 am

    Not so much a comment on the article as just a slight note in Zork Zero’s favor: it has what I felt was the best text adventure puzzle I ever came across in Infocom’s catalog (or anyone else’s for that matter) – namely, the hard hat puzzle.

    – Casey

     
  8. S. John Ross

    April 30, 2016 at 8:18 am

    I went in hoping you’d make a hodj n podj comparison at some point. Glad to see it.

    I’m so mixed about Zork Zero because, like Meretzky, I see the Zork universe as not just a fantasy setting, but kind of the best fantasy setting, along with Groo’s world and WYHTL (partly because I’ve never been able to choke down the self-serious stuff like Tolkien, but mostly because when Zork is warm, it’s very successfully warm while being clever to boot … of course, Zork Zero is almost never warm …)

    I actually love the graphics a lot in ZZ … the shifts in borders give a real sense of tone, and the little square symbols (used on both the automap and as “illuminations” in the text) worked well for me.

    But yeah. So much of it feels phoned in, even nasty … and playing it on the heels of Beyond Zork, which I found (and still find) pretty magical in most respects, it just felt like a kind of cruel trap. “Ha ha, we have your heart and now we’ll stomp on it a bit here’s a tower of effing Hanoi.” More recently, the Professor Layton series manages a much more charming approach to presenting a chestnut bucket as an adventure.

    But … there are bits I love. I love the opening. I replay the opening regularly, and then just quit and imagine the rest keeps on feeling like that. I feel like a strong editorial hand could reach in and slap Zork Zero down into something much more compact, and the other hand could slap some warmth into it.

     
  9. Keith Palmer

    April 30, 2016 at 12:26 pm

    I can’t remember now if I saved Zork Zero until I was running low on games in “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” (by which point “colour Macs” weren’t quite so expensive and distinctively rare as I suppose they must have been in 1988) or just until I’d played through all the other Zork adventures. In any case, though, I suppose by that point I had lost most of my reluctance to resort to the hint books, and Zork Zero’s built-in hints would have been less overbearing than the unconcealed text in the “Lost Treasures” book…

    I do remember seeing the “Infocom’s new graphics” ad in an issue of “Games” magazine at my school library, and having already picked up on the old “the imagination has better resolution than any computer screen” selling point from a previous “Games” article there was a bit of an odd feeling mixed in with some actual excitement… Still, I have impressions of the mood of the IF community being openly hostile to “graphic adventures” in the mid-1990s, and I was contrasting the general mood in this piece and its responses to thoughts some first reactions to this adventure “must” have had overtones similar to “Dylan going electric” (or, to be perhaps perilously more recent, to the way some fetishize movie special effects from the early 1980s).

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      April 30, 2016 at 6:58 pm

      There’s always been a lot of talk about this subset of text-adventure fans who were supposedly ideologically opposed to the inclusion of graphics, but I must say I’ve never really met any of them in all my years of playing and studying text adventures. I think these folks were/are at least as much mythical as real. Certainly there weren’t any of them at Infocom; “we stick out graphics where the sun don’t shine” was never really more than a clever marketing angle for them. About the most extreme position I’ve ever noticed is more one of indifference to graphics than outright hostility — i.e., as long as the core game isn’t simplified or dumbed down in order to make room for them, they’re accepted and often appreciated. During the 8-bit era, the core game usually *did* suffer to one degree or another from the inclusion of graphics, as Infocom’s advertising so memorably highlighted. (The games of Magnetic Scrolls are arguably the only exception.) Machines like the Macintosh and Amiga, however, were barely idling when running a typical Infocom text-only game, and could easily support graphics as well without losing anything. I suspect that Infocom’s lingering fear of outraged text-only purists was a case of them believing their own marketing a bit too much.

       
  10. David Cornelson

    April 30, 2016 at 6:12 pm

    I barely remember buying and playing Zork Zero, but I do know I loved every second of it. I’ve never been one to relate Infocom puzzles to hoary old ones, so that would have never mattered to me.

    I think if you just play the game and catch Meretzky’s humorous jabs often enough, it makes you feel at home, or in a small computer lab in a high school in Milwaukee playing DUNGEO (mainframe Zork) on a paper terminal with wide green bar paper.

    It’s too bad they didn’t just focus on making great stories and resisted any attempt to be dragged into the graphical world. A few years later and they would have had the Internet and HTML to handle those things.

     
  11. Janice M. Eisen

    May 1, 2016 at 12:53 am

    I seem to have liked the game more than you did, but I literally remembered nothing about playing it except the triumph I felt when I solved the Double Fanucci puzzle. (Upon reading your review, I remembered the 400-story tower, but literally nothing else you mentioned rang a bell.) I even had to go look up the game on Wikipedia to make sure I wasn’t confusing it with Beyond Zork.
    It’s sad that there are so many late Infocom games with great potential that never reached it because of the company’s troubles.

     
  12. Lee Jones

    May 4, 2016 at 8:49 am

    I’ve been following the story of Infocom pretty closely on this blog from the beginning.

    I’m also a bit of a history buff, with a particular interest in the Titanic, so the mention of an unmade Titanic game has really piqued my interest.
    Is there anymore information about it online? Does Steve Meretzky talk about his work? Is there a way to contact him?
    I REALLY want to know more about this.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      May 4, 2016 at 6:04 pm

      It’s been a game Meretzky has tried to get made for many years. I know a fair amount of the plot as he’d developed it by the late 1990s. It’s a very interesting historical angle indeed. Not to be a tease, but I don’t really feel it’s my place to publicly describe the plot in detail, in case Meretzky does still harbor hopes of getting it made someday. My best advice is to write to him yourself: http://boffo.us/. I’ve always found him to be quite accessible and responsive — which doesn’t of course guarantee he’ll want to divulge his design in detail.

       
      • Lee Jones

        May 5, 2016 at 7:57 am

        Thanks for the info. Sent him a message.

        Considering my fandom for Infocom, I almost feel like I’m making contact with a rock star.

         
        • Jeffrey

          May 28, 2019 at 7:00 pm

          I would recommend listening to the Eaten by a Grue podcast episode wherein they interview Steve – iirc he discusses the Titanic game. http://monsterfeet.com/grue/

           
  13. Andrew Schultz

    May 8, 2016 at 5:17 am

    My take on the “old chestnut” puzzles (as someone who likes puzzles) was

    1. Neat! something I can solve right away!
    2. Ooh, I knew this too.
    3. Hm, this does seem a little forced, even though it is playing to my strength. Am I getting spoiled or something?
    4. Help! I can’t do much else other than what’s in the hint-feelies!

    I was 13 at the time. I remember still having trouble getting through the puzzles I didn’t know even with the hints.

    I think to some extent it was impressive to see any of this implemented–but the fun didn’t last so well. And speaking as a puzzle fan my favorite bits were still knowing and remembering which Flathead had which item.

    That said, I was able to sit back and enjoy it for what it was years later. It did feel a bit disjointed, though, and the thrill of maybe SCORING ONE THOUSAND POINTS wore off too soon.

    Has anyone ever tried to reverse engineer Double Fanucci? I’d be curious about the rules. I still wonder now and then.

     
  14. Jonathan Badger

    May 9, 2016 at 1:00 pm

    I’m surprised that Moriarty was such a humorless prude about Meretzky’s proposed Biblical spoof. A *lot* of people find humor about the absurdities of religion extremely funny (Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, the “Great Prophet Zarquon” from Hitchhikers’ etc.). Yes, I’m sure a few people would have been (or rather *claimed* to have been without actually playing it) offended, but at least in the West, such people are a thankfully tiny percentage of the population.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      May 9, 2016 at 1:42 pm

      Well, there’s good satire and bad satire. To me, Meretzky’s proposal just sounds hectoring, obvious, mean-spirited, and dull. But apart from that I suppose it would have been fine. ;)

       
      • Spike

        January 27, 2018 at 12:51 am

        Moriarty’s line about “frothing nutcakes” jogged something in my memory. Sure enough, a little bit of Internet searching turned up this old article of Meretzky’s from The Status Line.

        I wonder if “frothing nutcakes” was an in-house term at Infocom to refer to, as Meretzky calls them, “religious fringe types.”

        (Reading Meretzky’s letter also reminds me of the Dungeons & Dragons moral panic of roughly the same era.)

         
  15. Melfina the Blue

    July 22, 2016 at 7:04 pm

    “The problem with that logic is that no one likes to turn to hints, whether found in the game itself, in a separate InvisiClues booklet, or in an online walkthrough. ”
    Hi, I do! But I play games for exploration and stories, not puzzles, and the boost I get for figuring out a frustrating puzzle is far less than the frustration I suffered, so yay walkthroughs and hint guides! (Not in any way suggesting you change your entry, just wanted to say that there is at least one person out there who contradicts your statement)

    Also, very much enjoying the history. I’ve always been a PC gamer, but much of the history you’ve covered so far was completely new to me (IBM family and I was a small to medium child in the 80s so…)

     
    • Lisa H.

      July 22, 2016 at 8:13 pm

      FWIW, I’m like you – I turn to hints or walkthroughs very quickly, sometimes not even beginning a game without such a resource available, because I would rather see the sights then get frustrated with my inability to solve puzzles.

       
  16. K. Garlow

    December 21, 2018 at 4:50 pm

    Correction: I believe “nickle-and-dimeing” is spelled “nickel-and-diming”.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      December 22, 2018 at 5:57 am

      Thanks!

       
  17. Leo Vellés

    December 11, 2019 at 7:28 pm

    “After Meretzky completed Leather Goddesses the following year, Zork Zero turned up again on his next list of possible next projects. ”
    The double “next” in this sentence is intended?

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      December 13, 2019 at 3:24 pm

      Thanks, but yes, it was.

       
  18. Sebastian

    May 11, 2020 at 6:48 pm

    “a move that couldn’t have set very well”

    Sat

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      May 12, 2020 at 9:06 am

      Thanks!

       
  19. David Meyer-Lindenberg

    January 9, 2021 at 6:41 pm

    First off, thanks for writing this blog, Jimmy. My dad introduced me to Infocom when I was a child, sparking a love affair with the games and genre that’s lasted up to the present day. Reading your articles, thoughtful and detailed as they are, has been a very stimulating experience.

    I agree that Zork Zero has more than its share of cliched puzzles. I also didn’t like how the game incents you to drop the artifacts you find in the cauldron, but doing so not-infrequently locks you out of victory unless you used them to solve a random puzzle first – especially annoying since many of the artifacts really are otherwise useless! But what I loved about Zero is the sense it gives you of dungeon-delving, exploring the forgotten nooks and crannies of a dying world. I remember feeling elated at solving the Oracle’s puzzle and penetrating into the Grey Mountains, or finding the dead lovers in a sealed-off coal mine, or rediscovering some long-lost artist’s overlook, hidden beside a cliff that even to reach took some ingenuity. It gave me a strong sense of place, which I appreciated all the more given how ungrounded in geography some of the other Infocom titles can feel.

    The game also, I think, pays a fair bit of attention to catering to the player’s natural curiosity about things in the world. One thing I like is that it consistently allows you to apply mechanism x – which only in fact solves a puzzle if applied to thing a – to things b, c, and d as well, and rewards you by outputting interesting little bits of information. For example, there’s a frozen lake in the Grey Mountains that reveals the history and nature of a magic item if you hold it up to the ice. Well, you can do that for just about every magic item in the game, and the well-written mini-stories you get as a result make you feel all the more immersed in the world, even if you can’t use them to solve a puzzle. It’s kind of like the ZIFMIA/AIMFIZ spells from the Enchanter trilogy in that respect.

     
    • Nathanael

      March 6, 2021 at 1:30 pm

      You have again nailed what I love about Zork Zero. The exploration. Discovering the top and bottom of the world, the artists’ outlook, etc….

      Honestly I think the exploration is what I play adventure games for (and cRPGs), more than anything else.

      Even the first time I got a new graphical border by moving into a different room was exciting.

      And Zork Zero is really quite excellent for the joy of exploration, even if the herd of unicorns could have used more descriptive text.

       
  20. Roger Durrant

    February 16, 2021 at 11:39 am

    A very interesting road. The zeitgeist at Infocom in those last days seems to smack of nothing less than nostalgic self denial; like the Berlin bunker in April 1945 the chief protagonists seem to have preferred harking back to the good old days of proud conquest.

     
  21. Ben

    August 18, 2023 at 9:30 pm

    Mereztky -> Meretzky

    Leather Goddess of Phobos -> Leather Goddesses of Phobos

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      August 21, 2023 at 12:10 pm

      Thanks!

       

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