zork
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Stephen Colbert dares you to 'Escape From a Man-Sized Cabinet'
The beard might be gone, but Stephen Colbert has a new way to entertain you ahead of his debut with The Late Show this September. Game-playing folks of a certain age with pretty fond memories of text-adventure Zork will surely get a bang out of Escape From the Man-Sized Cabinet where you venture into an office cabinet, choose from various text prompts ranging from euphemistically waking up a centaur to continuously standing inside the cabinet until... well, I'm not going to spoil the surprise for you. The writing is pretty funny throughout and clicking through the story is actually a pretty excellent way to get a few laughs before the weekend starts. Want to make your own and maybe add in a Grue? Well, considering that Escape is a Twine-made title, that probably isn't out of the realm of possibilities.
GOG.com sale highlights 30 games from the past 30 years
A new promotion at GOG is bringing 30 games from the past 30 years into the spotlight. A rotating carousel of discounted games will be offered, one at a time – as more people purchase the highlighted deal, it gets more time as a featured game. GOG users can also vote to cut or add a second to each deal's promotion time. Discounts can reach as high as 90% and sale prices can go as low as $0.59. Before this post was published, we saw a bundle of the first three Space Quest games offered up for $2.99. The sale started with Zork Anthology, a six-game collection of the classic text-adventure series, for $1.79. Once GOG has gone through all 30 deals, the sale will end. If you're interested in checking out what's available, point your browser over to GOG.com and get comfortable. There's no telling how long each game will be featured. Image: GOG
Chaos Theory: An adventure game is you!
I grew up on adventure games before I even knew they were called "adventure games." One of my earliest memories of a friend's computer was playing Adventure. Following that, I was hooked. Maniac Mansion. King's Quest. Zork. Planetfall. Leisure Suit Larry. Space Quest. The Secret of Monkey Island. Sam and Max Hit the Road. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Myst. Gabriel Knight. Syberia. The Longest Journey. Back to the Future. The Walking Dead. I've never stopped loving the fun of exploring these worlds, "earning" the next page of the story, and finding out all of the bizarre ways I could die. However, at some point in the '90s, games journalists apparently decided that "adventure games were dead." It's something we started hearing a lot of, especially in comparison to all of the fancy new graphics, gameplay features, and fast-paced shooters. Adventure games were seen as a relic of a time when computers couldn't process heavy graphic loads and players were a lot more patient. I never bought into the "adventure games are dead" mindset. I see them coming back like crazy these days, especially on tablets and mobile devices. And lo and behold, Funcom did something that I would have never thought possible: The studio made an MMO out of an adventure game. That's The Secret World, if you weren't following along.
Creators of Zork to accept Pioneer Award at DICE Summit, hide WIRED interview behind new text adventure
If you've ever been eaten by a grue, you can blame Dave Lebling, Marc Blank and and a small team of their friends -- Zork, and the notoriously frustrating text adventure game genre that followed is all their fault. The games were challenging, but they were also the most complex narratives told through video games at the time, and their creators are finally getting their dues. Early next year, Blank and Lebling are slated to receive the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Pioneer Award at the DICE Summit. The name implies the details: the award honors those who helped pioneer the gaming industry with their early work, ultimately paving the way for the titles and hardware we enjoy today. How influential was the title? Too young for nostalgic reminisces of "interactive fiction?" Head on over to Wired for a lesson in history -- it's hidden its entire interview with Dave Lebling behind a text adventure of its own design.
Have a good, Zork-filled weekend with Activision Treasures sale on GOG
It seems like a good old weekend to play some good old games, and luckily there's a website dedicated to supporting exactly that. This weekend, GOG has a mad rush of Zork titles and other "Activision Treasures" on sale, including Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands, Return to Zork and The Zork Anthology, which has Zork 1-3, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero and Planetfall.All Zorky titles are half off, for $3 each this weekend, along with Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, Caesar 3 and Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption, the last of which we hear was recently rebooted as an open-world western. Or, wait. That may have been something else entirely.
The Game Archaeologist discovers the Island of Kesmai
It was the mid-'80s, and I was just a kid in love with his family's IBM PC. Not having a wealth of capital at the time, I relied on hand-me-down copies of software that rolled in from friends and family and probably the Cyber-Mafia. Practically none of the disks came with instructions (or even labels, sometimes), and as such I felt like an explorer uncovering hidden gems as I shoved in 5 1/4" floppy after 5 1/4" floppy. Some titles were great fun, some were so obtuse I couldn't get into them, and some were obviously meant for those older and wiser than I. One game that fell into the latter category was a brutally difficult RPG that smelt of Dungeons & Dragons -- a forbidden experience for me at the time. It was just a field of ASCII characters, jumbled statistics, and instant death awaiting me around every corner. I gave it a few tries but could never progress past the first level, especially when I'd keep running out of arrows, so I gave up. Unbeknownst to me, I had my first brush with Rogue, an enormously popular dungeon crawler that straddled the line between the description-heavy RPGs and arcade titles like Gauntlet. Rogue defined the genre when it came out in 1980, spawning dozens of "Roguelikes" that sought to cash in on the craze. Not five years after its release, Rogue got a worthy successor that decided it could bring this addicting style of gameplay to the larva form of the Internet. It was called Island of Kesmai, but you may call it "Sir, yes sir!"
All of the Zorks down 40 percent on GOG this weekend
Do you prefer the text-based, imagination-requiring Zorks of yore, or the slightly more recent (but still wicked old) adventure game Zorks? Guess what: It doesn't matter! You're buying all of them, because the entire Zork franchise is 40 percent off today on the GOG storefront.
Telecommunications device for the deaf gets hitched to a rotary phone, hacked to run Zork
In today's episode of "But will it run Zork?" a chap named Ulysses got the vintage game to run on a TDD (telecommunications device for the deaf) -- a project he built to show off at the Bay Area Maker Faire last weekend. In a move we truly respect, he hunted down a rotary phone lifted straight out of the era when Zork was conceived (that would be the late '70s / early '80s). Then, he modified a modem so that the acoustically coupled TDD could be interfaced -- transmitting at a slow 45.5 baud to make it easy for even ponderous readers to keep up, one line at a time on the TDD's narrow display. Once this was sorted, things weren't exactly smooth sailing when Ulysses started fitting the compressed Zork story file into the system. At first, he tried using an Arduino Pro and an Arduino Mega, but found that neither had enough memory to accommodate the compressed Zork story file. Ultimately, he took a different tack and settled on an embeddable FitPC. We'd love nothing more than to see this thing in action, but in lieu of a video we highly suggest carving out a few minutes and perusing Ulysses' photo blog at the source link.
Modder miniaturizes 5.25-inch disk drive, brings microSD support to Atari 400
You aren't looking at a retro microSD card reader, you're looking at an Atari-compatible serial disk drive that just happens to use microSD in lieu of 5.25-inch floppies. In a Zork inspired fit of nostalgia (we've all been there), hardware modder Rossum paired up an Atari connector with a LPC1114 microcontroller, capable of emulating up to eight Atari drives, managed by a custom, auto-booting app. The whole package is neatly packed in to a tiny 3D printed replica of the original Atari 810 disk drive, and is available for sale never -- but don't let that stop you: Rossum's schematics are free for the taking. The word's biggest little Atari drive is just a DIY away. [Thanks, Francesco F.]
The Game Archaeologist plays with MUDs: The history
You know that sinking feeling when you get into something that's way, waaaay over your head and you have no choice but to swim furiously or drown? That's exactly how I felt when I started to do research for this month's series on MUDs -- Multi-User Dungeons -- and their descendants. At first I was thrilled, because I knew that along with Dungeons & Dragons and Bulletin Board Systems, the MUD was one of the key predecessors to the MMORPG as we know it today. It was, and still is, vital gaming history that helped to shape the genre. The only problem was that for various reasons -- mostly a lack of good internet access in college and general ignorance -- I'd missed out on MUDs back in the day. But it's not like that stopped me from covering any of the other games in this series that I never experienced first-hand way back when; after all, there are few among us who can honestly say they did everything. So the problem wasn't the lack of first-hand knowledge but the sheer, overwhelming scope of this subject. One game alone is a manageable subject -- MUDs are an entire genre unto themselves. It's intimidating, to say the least. It doesn't still my excitement, however, nor will it stop us from diving into this topic no matter how deep the waters get. This week we'll take a look at the brief history of the MUD/MUSH/MOO/et al. and then get into specific games later this month. So hold your breath and jump on in with me!
Zork Nemesis adds some FMV to GOG
Have you always wanted to try your hand at an entry in the Zork franchise, but possess a deep-seated fear of lengthy reading sessions? Don't fret -- the latest addition to the GOG line-up, Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands, is more pre-occupied with Myst III-esque visuals and full motion video cutscenes than drowning the player in deluges of monochromatic text. Though, we'd understand if there were people who are also deathly afraid of FMV, too. (Night Trap still gives us the heebie-jeebies.) Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands is available on GOG.com for $6 -- which seems like a reasonable price to find out why those lands are so darn forbidden.
GOG asks: Want Return to Zork? 'Course you do!
"Want some rye? 'Course you do!" That's literally the only thing I remember from Return to Zork, Infocom's FMV-filled 1993 graphical adventure game. I think I might have enjoyed playing it, though, so I'm happy to see that it's now available on GOG. For just $5.99, you too can enter a world of people offering you rye, and solve the dual mysteries of who offered you rye, and whether or not your character wanted some. Also, there's something about the Great Underground Empire of Zork being found "beneath the Valley of the Sparrows."
GOG gets Zork [something, something, eaten by a grue]
I gave Police Quest some good-natured ribbing for its antiquated presentation, but that was before I learned today's other Good Old Games addition was The Zork Anthology, which includes Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero and Planetfall (the lone non-Zork title). Sure, you get six games for six bucks but (and I'm not making this up) they don't have any pictures. Like, none. If I was scoring the graphics, I'd give them a "None" because they don't have them. OK, Zork Zero has a graphical user interface and a couple of graphical minigames, but that's a slim part of one of the six games. That may be statistically significant in your book, but not mine. Nope, I'm sticking with no graphics. Some of the guys on staff will chide me and say that I shouldn't disparage a hilarious, important series of games just because there are no pictures to accompany the text-based adventures. Then they'll probably say something about a grue. They've got a point, sure ... but like, no graphics. Zilch. Six dollars may be a steal, but it's also a mighty big gamble on whether or not you still have a functioning imagination.
Livescribe hack lets you play Zork with (smart) pen and paper
Livescribe's pen certainly seems like a hackable enough device, but for some reason we haven't seen many hacks or mods that make the smart pen even smarter (or dumber, for that matter). One big one quietly popped up last month, however, and has apparently gone largely unnoticed until now. YouTube user "chipos81" has managed to port Infocom's Z-Machine virtual machine to the pen (the Echo, specifically), and you know what that means: Zork on paper. Look down. Examine link. Go past break. Watch video. [Thanks, Charlie]
Interactive fiction meets interactive typewriter, pilfers the kingdoms of Zork (video)
You are standing in an open field as usual, or perhaps you're in the darkness, likely to be eaten by a grue, but the words aren't etching their way into your soul from the familiar computer terminal -- they're on freshly printed paper. Like a player piano, the Automatypewriter lets you play games like Zork by automatically keying in letters via a series of solenoids and fishing line to tell you where you are, and it records your input, too; every time you type "XYZZY" in vain, it's an Arduino board that sends signals to the text parser, which directs a hollow voice to pity your foolish word. Forget the iPad typewriter -- this is old-school. See it in action after the break, or hit the source link for the schematics to build one yourself. Just be sure to install Planetfall, too.
> Text adventures come to Kindle, other e-readers
We're ... we're just so proud of all the would-be e-readers. Following known non-book Scrabble's ascent to the top of the Kindle sales charts, we learn from Ars Technica that a handful of gaming entrepreneurs have brought Zork I, II, III and Mini-Zork to the Kindle and other e-readers. While an e-reader's typically nubby keyboard might not be the best form of input for an interactive novel like this, we're strong supporters of any innovation that allows us to use our books to play video games. One hang-up, though -- can't we get a game on the Kindle that doesn't require so much reading?
Impressions: Action Castle
We ask for your patience as you attempt to wrap your mind around the concept behind Action Castle: It's a text adventure akin to Zork, only the dialogue and choices are conducted by speaking -- no pen, paper or arduous typing is involved in the process. Can you comprehend that? If so, you're one step ahead of Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik (a.k.a. Gabe), who was flummoxed when presented with a live demonstration of the "game" during the PA Q&A panel yesterday afternoon. Check out a NSFW video of the demo after the jump. We missed the first part of the presentation, but here's the prompt which kicked things off: "You are in a cottage. There is a fishing pole here. Exits are out." Hilarity ensues.
Legend of Zork online adventure goes live
It may seem odd at first, but if there's a more perfect day to launch an online Zork game, we don't know about it. So we feel pretty confident in reporting that Legends of Zork really did go live today. You can start playing for free right here.We haven't spent much time with it, but we love the art style, and the requisite humor seems to be there. Give it a spin and let us know what you think.
New Zork game no longer an MMO
If you've been following along with the site, you may remember a story we ran on a brand new Zork game, and the press release that told us that it was to be a casual MMO. In fact, we believe the exact sentence was "designed to provide gamers with a casual MMO game they can play on their laptop, desktop or Apple iPhone (in school, work or on the bus)."It now appears that the game is no longer an MMO at all, but a "casual persistent online adventure."ShackNews has gotten the information straight from Jolt's CEO, Dylan Collins, that Legends of Zork will be a casual adventure that will "sneak into your soul" and not an online MMO. Looks like we're back to having daydreams about black screens and white text again.
Zork returns in 'Legends of Zork,' a casual MMO
Sometimes, it seems that games are created just for us. They're lovingly mixed together from base ingredients we can't resist, rolled out on a floured surface, cut into Joystiq-logo shaped cookies and baked to a delicious golden brown. That's exactly what Jolt Online has done by resurrecting the "Zork" franchise in Legends of Zork, a casual, browser-based MMO. Aside from telling Gamasutra that the game would feature microtransations and that it could be played on a computer or iPhone, Jolt's hasn't spilled much in the way of details. But rest assured that we'll be buying the game (or buying a wicked cool sword in the game, as the case may be) on day one.
