Priority Adventure 7: Zork: The Great Underground Empire (1980)

For long-time readers of the blog (or those who've gone back through the archives), this post might give a sense of deja vu.  After all, I have covered Zork before, way back in the dim dark days of 2016 (the so-called "worst year ever" until every year after proved to be successively more horrible).  The version I covered at that time was the original developed for the PDP-10 mainframe at MIT, or the closest I could get to emulating that version.  Today I'm covering the game in it's most iconic, recognisable form: its commercial release as Zork I: The Great Underground Empire.

But first, a little history refresher.  After Colossal Cave Adventure became popular at MIT, four students (Dave Lebling, Tim Anderson, Marc Blank and Bruce Daniels) decided to create their own game in the same style.  They developed it from 1977 to 1979, and it proved extremely popular.  After graduation, three of the game's creators (Lebling, Blank and Anderson) went on to help found Infocom as a software development company.  The three of them convinced the other founders that Zork could be sold commercially, and the game's eventual success changed the entire direction of the company.

In the original game, the goal was to explore the Great Underground Empire in search of 31 treasures.  Finding all of the treasures allowed entry to the Tomb of the Unknown Implementer, and an end-game gauntlet of puzzles that led to a fantastic treasury.  The game ended with the player being forced to assume the role of the Dungeon Master, who must oversee the dungeon and its trials.  The complete Zork was far too large for release on home computers, so the development team gradually cut it down into a smaller game.  This game was released late in 1980 for the TRS-80, then on the Apple II in 1981 (followed by every computing platform known to man in later years).

The initial release of Zork was distributed by Personal Software, and features some artwork of dubious accuracy.  The white house and the mailbox are on point, but the hulking barbarian is a far cry from the adventurer of Zork, at least as I imagine him.  The manual that came with this version was quite extensive at around 30 pages, but mostly focuses on introducing the player to basic text adventure concepts, with little in the way of lore.

By 1981 Infocom had taken control of its own packaging, and this saw the debut of the classic cover that most of you should recognise.  Early releases of this cover featured the same manual as before, but eventually the game would come with a booklet entitled The Great Underground Empire: A History (the version I found has a copyright of 1984).  It's written in Infocom's customarily humorous style, and presents a history of the kings of Quendor, the empire which formerly ruled the lands where Zork is set.  In brief, the war-like king Duncanthrax, after conquering everything he could on the surface, decided to expand his empire below ground, hiring the Frobozz Magic Construction Company to undertake the project.  The work would be continued by his great-grandson, Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive, who commissioned a number of large and pointless projects (including the Flood Control Dam which appears in the game).  That this was all written years after Zork's development should tell you how relevant it is to the game itself, but it's amusing enough to be worth a read anyway.

I replayed Zork earlier this year (April, which means I've nearly caught up to the present day), choosing the Apple II version.  It didn't take me long to breeze through, because I pretty much know all of this game's puzzles by heart.  Playing this game is almost like being on autopilot for me, so I have no memory of the order I did things, or what my mental process was like at the time.  There probably wasn't any mental process at all.  So instead of going through the game beat by beat, I'm just going to run through all of the treasures and where they're found, with a focus on what's changed from the original game.

The iconic beginning.

The game begins in front of a white house, with the player standing next to a mailbox.  The mailbox contains a leaflet welcoming the player to Zork.  The surrounding forest hasn't changed from the original, still featuring a grate hidden under a pile of leaves, a tree with a nest containing a jewel-encrusted egg, and a canyon leading to the end of a rainbow.  The house inside is also much the same: a kitchen with a water bottle and a sack (containing garlic and some lunch); a dark attic with a rope and a knife; and a living room where the player finds an elvish sword, a lantern, and an empty trophy case to store any treasures they find.  The original version had a couple of extra items: a newspaper reporting on recent updates to the game, and a clay brick in the attic.  The newspaper's obviously no longer needed, as the game's no longer in active development, and the puzzle involving the clay brick has been cut (more on that, and other cut content, below).

Also in the living room is a trapdoor hidden beneath a rug, which leads to the Great Underground Empire.  This is where the vast majority of the game's treasures are found, and as I said above I'm going to run through them all to give a sense of the game.  If I don't mention any differences from the original game, assume the treasure is obtained in roughly the same way in both versions.

1. Jewel-Encrusted Egg: This is found in a tree not far from the white house, and is likely to be the first treasure the player will find.  In a devious touch, it also happens to contain one of the last treasures the player is likely to find.  See the Clockwork Canary below.

2. Beautiful Painting: The path south of the entrance to the underground leads to an art gallery, where this painting is found.  There's also a shaft here leading back up to the house, but the player can't squeeze through while carrying more than two inventory items.  It's a quickly discovered way back to the surface, but an inconvenient one for someone who's found a lot of treasures.

3. Bag of Coins: North of the entrance to the underground is a hostile axe-wielding troll, who will have to be dealt with violently.  (Zork has a couple of combat encounters, the outcomes of which are randomly determined.  The player is more likely to succeed the more treasures they've found, but the troll is met much too early in the game for the player to have gotten any stronger.  Luckily the elvish sword is usually enough to kill it.)  West of the troll is a "maze of twisty little passages, all alike", which can be mapped by dropping items. (I must admit, this time around I just used a map I'd made years earlier.)  Found in the maze is the skeleton of a former adventurer, and on its body is a rusty knife, a useless lantern, a skeleton key, and a bag of coins.  The coins are a treasure, and the key unlocks a grate  in the maze that leads back to the surface.  (This adventurer was supposed to be the protagonist of Colossal Cave Adventure, something that I guess wouldn't have been as obvious to home computer players as it was to the mainframe users at MIT.)

In combat with the troll.  They've cleaned out the seemingly meaningless
string of numbers that appears every round in the mainframe version

4. Platinum Bar: Not far east of the Troll is a room that's so loud you can't concentrate to take any actions; everything you try just results in your command being echoed back at you.  There's a platinum bar here, but the noise means you can't pick it up.  I've always beaten this puzzle by using the ECHO command, which then allows you to act as normal.  It's somewhat nonsensical, but shouting "echo" when there's an echo is something people do in real life, so I appreciate the designers acknowledging it.  Apparently the noise is coming from the Flood Control Dam above, and you can also stop the noise by messing around with the dam, but I've never tried it that way.

5. Torch: Not far from the Loud Room is a room with a deep shaft and a railing.  You can tie a rope to the railing and climb to the bottom, where you'll find an ivory torch that is always lit.  This item fixes the problem of your lantern having a limited battery, but it's also liable to be stolen by the thief if he wanders past.  (Speaking of the thief, his tendency to move items around made this one of the biggest problem areas of the original version of the game.  If you left the rope tied to the railing, he'd almost certainly wander by, untie it, and leave it at the bottom of the shaft where you could no longer get to it.  It's needed for a later puzzle, so if this happens you can't win the game.  In Zork 1 you only need the rope to climb down this shaft, so if this happens it's not such a big deal.)

6. Gold Coffin: South of the Torch Room is a Temple, an Altar, and an Egyptian Room where you find a gold coffin.  In the original game this coffin's in an entirely different area, and due to its size and weight it takes a bit of rigmarole to carry it back to the trophy case.  In Zork I you just need to pick it up then go pray at the nearby altar to be transported to the surface.

7. Sceptre: The sceptre is inside the coffin.  I don't think this treasure is in the original game.

8. Pot of Gold: If you take the sceptre to the end of the rainbow, you can WAVE SCEPTRE and the rainbow becomes solid.  A pot of gold also appears at the end of the rainbow.  This puzzle is in the original game, but instead of the sceptre you have to wave a magic wand which looks like a normal stick.  Once the rainbow is solid you can use it to get to the top of the nearby waterfall.

9. Crystal Skull: Back at the Temple and Altar you'll find a brass bell, a book, and some candles.  Not far from there is a gate to Hades that's blocked by the spirits of the dead.  To get by the spirits you need to ring the bell, light the candles (using matches from the Dam), and read from the book.  This lets you pass through the gate into Hades where you'll find a crystal skull just lying around.  In the original game this gate leads to the Tomb of the Unknown Implementor, which eventually opens to reveal the end-game trial that's been cut from Zork 1.  There's no crystal skull in the original game either.

10. Trunk of Jewels: Getting this treasure requires operating Flood Control Dam #3.  To do this you need to figure out the right buttons to press in the dam's control room, and activate the control panel with a wrench.  This activates the dam which lowers the water level of the river so you can cross.  You can also then take the trunk of jewels, which is embedded in the river floor.

11. Trident: The crystal trident of Poseidon is just lying around to the north of the river, and you can easily take it once you've activated the dam and crossed over. Alternatively you can use a mirror situated not far from the entrance to Hades: touching it teleports you to another mirror near the Trident Room.

12. Jade Figurine: Not far from there is a room with a Giant Bat guarding a jade figurine.  The bat will grab you and dump you somewhere in the nearby Coal Mine, but if you're carrying some garlic it will leave you alone and you can take the figurine.

Being carried away by the bat, with a reference to Hunt the Wumpus.

13. Sapphire Bracelet: This bracelet is between the Bat Room and the Coal Mine, in a room filled with gas.  Taking the ivory torch or a lit candle into this room results in a fatal explosion, but the lantern is safe.

14. Diamond: At the end of the Coal Mine maze is a strange machine that can only be turned on if you're carrying a screwdriver.  Getting into this room requires squeezing through a narrow crack, which you can only do while carrying one item.  Unfortunately it's also dark in this area, so you need to bring a light source through as well as the items required for the machine.  This is done via a basket that can be sent down from an area above.  With all of this done, you then need to place a piece of coal in the machine and activate it to turn the coal into a diamond.

15. Jeweled Scarab: To get this item you first need to find the boat at the base of the dam, then inflate it using an air pump found across the river.  Any sharp items in your inventory will cut the boat open, so you need to be careful before getting in and riding it downstream on the river.  After a while you can disembark on a beach on the east bank and dig to find the scarab.  In the original game, this item is a statue.

16. Large Emerald: Further down the river is a buoy that's there to warn you that you're about to go over Aragain Falls.  If you take the buoy with you and open it up you'll find an emerald inside.

17. Silver Chalice: Deep in the maze is the lair of a Cyclops, which can be put to sleep with some food and water (or scared away with the name ODYSSEUS, but that solution's a little more obscure).  Up above the Cyclops' lair is the hideout of the Thief.  He'll show up to defend his home, and you'll have to beat him in a straight-up fight.  If you try this early in the game there's little chance you'll win, but once you've obtained a decent number of treasures and racked up a good score you'll be able to kill him.  In his lair you'll find the silver chalice, as well as any other treasures he's nicked off you during the game.

18. Clockwork Canary: But wait, don't kill that Thief too quickly...  First you'll need to make sure he steals the jewel-encrusted egg from you, because he's the only one who's skilled enough to get it open.  Inside the egg is a clockwork canary.  (Make sure to take the canary out of the egg before putting it in the trophy case, otherwise it won't register as a treasure.  I forgot about this, and it took me ages to figure out why the game wasn't acknowledging that I had all of the treasures.)

19. Brass Bauble: To find the bauble you need to take the clockwork canary into the forest and wind it up.  The canary's song will summon a bird that drops the bauble at your feet.  There are some birds singing occasionally when you go through the forest, which is definitely a clue, but this is one of the more obscure puzzles.

20. Ancient Map: Once you've placed the previous 19 treasures in the trophy case, an ancient map will appear.  This map leads outside to an old stone barrow, which you enter to beat the game and progress to Zork II.  This map isn't in the original game, as it has an entirely different end-game.

Following the map to the stone barrow. I forgot to screenshot
this when I played through, so I nicked this image from
gameingafter40.blogspot.com

Going back over Zork I and comparing it to the mainframe version, I'm impressed at how much of the game they managed to fit into a home computer release.  The entire overworld is present, as is the bulk of the underworld, albeit rearranged and streamlined somewhat.  The areas that haven't been included are the ones that are harder to get to, and the ones containing the most difficult puzzles.  I'll do a quick run-down of what was cut below:

• The Bank of Zork is gone, which is just as well because I never quite figured out how it works.  I guess I'll get to refamiliarise myself with it when I get to Zork II.
• The whole volcano shaft and the hot air balloon is gone.  In terms of timing it's one of the more complex sequences in the original game.  his is where the clay brick explosive I mentioned earlier came into play.
• The area with the four cakes where you have to eat one to shrink down has been cut.
• The nearby area where you have to control a robot to free yourself from a trap is also gone.
• The puzzle with the three interconnected crystal balls is gone.  This means that you no longer need to use the rope and timber to suspend yourself halfway down the coal mine shaft in order to access a secret room.  This was one of the cleverer puzzles of the original, but also one of the fiddliest, so I can't say I miss it.
• The entire end-game trial is gone, and as I recall has been moved to Zork III.
• There's no "last lousy point", which was earned by sending away for a brochure and receiving a stamp that featured a dig at Colossal Cave Adventure's creator Don Woods.  It's a shame, because I love the gag, but the in-joke wouldn't play as well on home computers as I assume it did to the mainframe users who were familiar with Zork's predecessor.

That's pretty much all the major material that's been cut from the game, which isn't a whole lot.  Of course this is just what I recalled from skimming my maps from years ago, so I could be missing something.  Most of this material was moved to Zork II, with just the end-game trial being moved to the third game.  I'm much less familiar with the latter two parts of the trilogy, and I'm looking forward to revisiting them to rediscover what's been added around the existing puzzles.

I heartily enjoyed going back to Zork I, but I know the game so well that it hardly counts as playing it.  Instead of being a challenge it's like a nostalgic walk through an old neighbourhood, albeit one where I might be murdered by a nasty Troll or a sly Thief.  But the atmosphere and idiosyncratic humour of the game are so good that I always enjoy going back, and I'm sure I'll do so again a few years down the track.  I expect this game to do exceptionally well on the RADNESS Index.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: The mailbox, the white house, Aragain Falls, Flood Control Dam #3, the maze of twisty passages, all alike...  The setting here is iconic, and the couple of asides about the fall of the Empire give it just a touch of history and wonder.  The treasure hunt story is nothing special, but as an excuse to explore the Great Underground Empire it does the job. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: The Troll, the Thief, the Cyclops and the Bat are pretty much it.  Most of them are simple puzzle or combat obstacles, but the Thief is something else entirely.  He has personality, he has an agenda, and he has the ability to make you hurl expletives at your monitor.  As I said when I played the mainframe version, the Thief is the single greatest villain in gaming up to that point.  As of Zork I's release in 1980, I still believe that's true.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Aesthetics: It's an old-school text adventure, but due to the enjoyable writing this one's going to score about as high as a text adventure of the era can score.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Mechanics: I don't know if I mentioned it the first time around, but the Zork parser runs really smoothly.  Perhaps it's just my familiarity with the game, but I hardly ever run into issues with finding the right command, and that can be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for this genre.  It also accepts some quite complex commands, especially in comparison to its contemporaries that are usually restricted to two words.  I might be rating this one a little high, but it's the parser that all others are measured by.  Rating: 5 out of 7.

Puzzles: It doesn't have the difficulty of the mainframe version, but the puzzles in this game have been tightened up, and the most irritating ones have been completely cut.  The difficulty ranges from dead simple to devious, but there's nothing here I'd classify as unfair.  Rating: 5 out of 7.

Challenge: Zork I is a tough game to crack, but with persistence it can be done without the need for a towering intellect (i.e. I was able to do it without help about a decade ago).  I especially like that it begins with loads of simple puzzles, and saves the really hard ones for later.  There's always something else to try in Zork, even when you feel like you're stuck.  There are random elements that can kill you off, but the most likely of these is the Troll, and he's encountered right near the start.  A hard game, but a fair one, and about as well-judged as any adventure game I've played. Rating: 6 out of 7.

Fun: I always enjoy going back to Zork, so there's going to be an amount of bias in this score.  But let me be real with you, this category is kind of bullshit, and represents nothing more than my own  personal enjoyment of a game.  Zork's one of my faves, but it's not one of my all-time faves, and there's only so much you can get out of most adventure games once you've explored what they have to offer.  It's hard to go past this one though, as it's one of the most enjoyable of the era.  Rating: 6 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2. Iconic, influential, and it still holds up.  A masterpiece.

The categories above total 33, which doubled comes to 66.  Add the bonus points, and Zork I scores a  whopping RADNESS Index of 68. That's the highest rated game on the blog so far.  The mainframe version is second on 64 points, which makes sense to me.  The mainframe version might have more packed in, but Zork I is more focused, with a tighter environment and an emphasis on the exploration and puzzles that worked best from the original.  Funnily enough, taking out the more frustrating parts of the original made for a better game.  I doubt I'll ever go back to the mainframe Zork, but there's no question of whether I'll return to Zork I.

NEXT: It's back to Scott Adams territory, as I put on my old west prospector's hat for Ghost Town.

Zork: Victory. Sort of.

Much to my surprise, I have finished Zork since my last post.  (I actually finished it weeks ago, it's just taken me forever to write this post.)  Normally this would be a cause for celebration, and an excuse to big up my mental prowess.  Beating Zork is no easy task.  Alas, I didn't do so alone, as for the second time in this blog I had to resort to a walkthrough.

I'd like to think I'm a good person.  I can be withdrawn and anti-social, and prone to foul moods, but I try not to be actively rude.  I've never punched anyone.  I've never knowingly killed anybody.  (You can never rule out actions taken while sleepwalking.)  And yet...  I cheated to win Zork.

Oh, I'm sure that I'm not the first.  I'd be surprised to meet anyone who claims that they beat the mainframe version of Zork with no help whatsoever.  This game is hard.  It's fair, I'll give it that.  Every puzzle has at least some clue, however obscure, that hints at the solution.  There's nothing here like the dynamite puzzle from Colossal Cave Adventure.  I wasn't up to the task, though.  Perhaps I would have solved it eventually, but it would have taken a long time, and I have enough lengthy, uncompleted games on this blog.  I wanted to wrap this up, so I allowed myself to partake of the knowledge of the internet.  My apologies, I did it in the name of progress.

Alright, with all apologies out of the way let's get on with the game.

At the end of my last post I had obtained 24 treasures, and was hoping that I would only need to find one more.  Twenty-five is a nice, round number, right?  Well, round it may be, but it wasn't the correct number of treasures to be found.  There are 31 treasures in this game, and I had a hell of a time getting them all.

The first one I found on my lonesome.  You may recall that when I used the weather balloon to get to the library I stashed the books I found in the balloon's basket.  You may also recall that the balloon crashed and all four books were destroyed.  Obviously I had messed up here, so I restored to an earlier save and investigated the books again.  As before, the writing in all four books was illegible.  I tried turning pages, to no avail.  Eventually I started closing and opening the books, and inside the purple one I found a valuable stamp.  Treasure count: 25!

I also found the second treasure without any help.  After I crossed the rainbow to get the statue, it occurred to me that the boat serves no purpose whatsoever.  You can take the magic stick, use it to cross the rainbow, and skip the boat altogether.  That didn't sit right to me.  Zork is a large game, but it's tight, and there are very few extraneous details in it.  So I pumped up the boat and floated down the river towards Aragain Falls.  The only thing of note on the river is the buoy that's there to warn you against going over the falls.  I took the buoy (which sounds implausible, but is hardly the most unrealistic thing in this game) and inside it I found an emerald.  Treasure count: 26!

From this point on, I needed help. The only lead that I had at this point was the white sphere I had found, and the vision that peering into it gave me of a distant room.  Said room had a large door with a window in it, and a key in the keyhole.  I had seemingly explored everywhere, though, and such a door was nowhere to be found.  I consulted a walkthrough to locate the door, and this is one I don't feel bad about, because I missed this through no fault of my own.  The problem lay in the differences between the versions of the game I've been using.  I had started using an adaptation of the Fortran version from 1980, in which going west from the Torch Room simply loops you back to the Torch Room.  Some time later I switched to one based on the MDL version from 1981, in which going west from the Torch Room takes you to another location with the door I was looking for.  If I'd been playing the MDL version from the beginning, I would certainly have found this on my own.  My mapping techniques are infallible.  Infallible, I say!

The puzzle was simple to solve from there, because it's one I've encountered in adventure games before.  The door was locked, but the key was on the opposite side of the door.  To get in I had to slide a welcome mat under the door, push the key out of the keyhole with a screwdriver, then pull the mat back with the key now on top of it.  It's an excellent puzzle, and that's probably why I've seen it in so many other games.  Most cliches were great before they became cliches.

Inside the room was a blue crystal sphere.  (Treasure count: 27!)  I figured that this one would show me a vision like the white one, and sure enough when I peered into it I saw a room that was covered in coal dust, with a sharply sloping roof.  I had my next clue, and a hint at where to find my next treasure: somewhere near the coal mine.

I wasted a lot of time in the area around the coal mine, trying various things.  I waved the stick everywhere.  I checked every possible direction from all the locations I thought were close enough.  There was one thing that drew my attention: a granite wall with the words "GRANITE WALL" engraved on it.  It had nothing to do with the solution (and as far as I can tell, no purpose in the game at all), but little did I know that I was in the right location.  Even so, I didn't figure this one out on my own, and I doubt I ever would have.

You see, in the room with that granite wall there's a slide that leads down to the cellar.  I've used that slide loads of times, it's a nice shortcut when heading for the surface.  As it turns out, the room I was looking for is halfway down the slide.  Getting there requires tying the rope to a piece of broken timber, using the timber as an anchor, and climbing down the slide until you're dangling about halfway.  There you'll find a ledge, and a room containing a red crystal sphere.  Treasure count: 28!  (I had earlier left the rope tied to a railing elsewhere in the dungeon, but when I went back to retrieve it the rope was gone.  I suspect that the Thief had moved it, and I had no idea where.  It's possible that he untied it and dropped it at the bottom of the pit, which is inaccessible without the rope.  If so, that is a dick move of legendary proportions.  Anyway, I had to start over from the beginning.  It only took an hour or so to get back to this point, but it was frustrating.  Even after his death the Thief had found a way to thwart me.)

For some reason, when I went back to redo this to get the screencap, 
the rope was too slippery for me to hold.  It's a mystery.

This is an excellent puzzle that relies on some genuinely practical problem-solving.  Sometimes the solutions in adventure games are so absurd that it's easy to overlook things that might work in the real world.  If I have one complaint about this puzzle, it's that sliding down the chute gives you no indication that there's a room halfway down.  Surely you'd see something as you flash past?

Looking over my notes, I saw that there was one last path I had yet to explore.  After killing the Thief in his hideout, I had found a hole leading downwards.  Nearby was a note from the Thief stating that there were absolutely no treasures down the hole, and no way for anyone entering the hole to return.  This had led me to believe that the endgame would be found here, so I'd avoided exploring the hole.  With no other leads, though, I decided to take a look.

What I found was a square room.  The west and north walls were made of marble, and the east and south of sandstone.  Just as the Thief had claimed, there were no treasures and no way to get back up through the hole.  My first instinct here was to walk through the walls, as I had done in the Bank.  That didn't work, and I was stuck here for a long, long time

Once again I had to resort to a walkthrough,which informed me that the sandstone walls were actually blocks that could be pushed.  At this point I closed the walkthrough down; it had pointed me in the right direction, and I was determined to figure the rest of this puzzle out on my own.

This is an unusual puzzle, in that it requires some overhead mapping.  The screenshot below shows how the game depicts this:

The goal is to move the sandstone blocks around until they're in a configuration that allows you to escape.  the first thing that I noticed while exploring was that two blocks have ladder on the side, one with a ladder on the west and another with a ladder on the east.  The other thing I found after pushing some blocks around was a gold card lying on the floor.  A little more block-pushing and I soon found door with a slot in it.  I inserted the card which opened the door, and I was able to make my escape.

Something felt wrong about it, though.  I had gained no benefit from this puzzle.  Yes, I had found a gold card, but that card had been eaten by the door.  Everything in Zork serves a purpose, so I quickly restored my game and started the puzzle over.  Sure enough, when I reclaimed the gold card my score increased: this was one of the treasures, and I needed to find a way out of the puzzle without losing it.

It didn't take me long to figure out that I needed to maneuver one of the ladder blocks so that it would allow me to climb back up the hole in the ceiling.  I drew a map of the puzzle, and it took me maybe ten minutes to figure out which blocks I needed to move.  Soon enough I had the block with the ladder on its west side in position, and I was able to escape with the card.  Treasure count: 29!

This is where I became really stuck.  I had no idea where to go or what to do, and it felt to me as though I had explored everywhere and done everything.  I had no leads at all.  So I thought what the hell, I've already cheated, why not cheat some more? My honour was already besmirched, there was no harm in besmirching it further.

Treasure 30 was a tin of rare spices.  You might remember a section of the game where I had to shrink down by eating a cake, and retrieve a flask of poison.  One of the cakes has "EAT ME" written on it, and the others are seemingly featureless.  If you examine the other three, though, you'll find tiny writing on them, too small to read with the naked eye.  The trick is to take the cakes into the area with the poison flask, and use the flask itself to magnify the writing.  Once it's illegible, the three cakes can be identified: orange is EXPLODE, blue is ENLARGE, and red is EVAPORATE.

The orange cake does indeed explode, and anyone who eats it will be killed.  The blue cake is used to restore you to normal size (though it can be a fatal under the wrong circumstances). Lastly there's the red cake, which says EVAPORATE.  I may never have figured this out without help.  In the area with the flask there's a puddle of slimy water.  I had disregarded this as a background detail, but it turns out that if you throw the red cake in the water it soaks it up, revealing a tin of rare spices.  Treasure count: 30!

And now, the final treasure.  I was but one point shy of a full score, which was giving me some nasty flashbacks to Colossal Cave Adventure.  This was shockingly appropriate, because getting that final point is absolutely the creators of Zork taking pot-shots at Don Woods.  You may remember that in Colossal Cave Adventure, there is one final point that you earn for taking a newspaper and dropping it off in a location known as Witt's End.  It's fairly obtuse, but Zork's equivalent takes the cake.  Needless to say I needed a walkthrough to figure all of this out.

The clue to this puzzle is found written on the matchbook found earlier in the game:

One could be forgiven for thinking of this a bit of light self-referential humour, and irrelevant to the game as a whole.  As far as I was concerned, it served as much purpose as the NBC commissary found on top of the rainbow.  I was wrong, however.  The key here is in the last line: "Send for our free brochure today".  Sure enough, if you type SEND FOR BROCHURE, the game replies with the following message: "Ok, but you know the postal service..."  Nothing happens for a while, but eventually when you go back to the house you will hear a knock on the door.  In the mailbox you will find said brochure, and affixed to the brochure is a stamp.

That's the Frobozz Magic Lamp Company, 
for anyone who's wondering.

This is the final treasure, and placing it in the treasure case grants you the last point needed for a full score.  I'm not sure how good-natured this swipe at Don Woods is, but I certainly laughed when I saw it.  "One lousy point" might be my favourite line in an adventure game so far.

With a full score I figured that the game would be over, but much as in Colossal Cave Adventure there's an endgame to deal with.  A few moves after storing the final treasure, a sinister, wraith-like figure appeared and informed me that I was now worthy to join the implementers.

(Once the endgame begins your score is set back to zero.  There are 100 points to be earned in the endgame.)

I never did find a use for that bat guano.

Another mystery solved: I obviously needed to go back to Hades, where the Tomb of the Unknown Implementer awaited.  Earlier attempts to open the tomb had resulted in my death, but now that I had been deemed worthy the tomb opened, and I was able to enter.  There was nothing inside, though, and once again I felt as though I was stuck.  I discovered the solution mostly by accident, just trying anything that came to mind: close the tomb door behind me, and turn off my lamp.

(I had more difficulties at the beginning of the endgame that I've made it sound here.  My lamp ran out on the way to Hades, and I had no matches left to light the candles.  There was no way for me to make it to the end without being eaten by a Grue.  One again I had to start over from scratch.)

At this point I was teleported to another location, and a voice informed me that I was about to face the ultimate challenge of Zork.  I was also given the INCANT option, and told that if I use it with a certain phrase I could instantly come back to this point.  It's a handy feature, especially given that you can't save your game past this point.  I never made much use of it, but in the game's original context it would have been invaluable to students wanting to get to the endgame without playing through the rest of the game again.

I was at the top of a flight of stairs.  At the bottom of the stairs was a room with a red button.  At the other end of the room was a beam of red light, and beyond that was a room with a mirror covering the entire north wall.  Pressing the button seemingly did nothing, and touching the mirror was useless.  Breaking it was certainly not the right thing to do.

The answer here was the red beam, and finding a way to deflect it.  It didn't take me long to figure out the solution, because when you get teleported to the endgame you can only take two items: the sword and the lamp.  I dropped the sword to block the beam, pressed the red button, and when I went back to the room with the mirror a panel had been opened.

This is where things got tricky.  Upon entering the panel, I got the following involved description:

This is where a diagram would have come in handy, and I ended up drawing one myself.  After the puzzle with the moving blocks, I was quick to try pushing the various coloured panels.  At first it didn't do anything except shake the room, but after I lifted the short pole I was able to move the room clockwise or anti-clockwise depending on which coloured-panel I struck.  The trick is to get the mahogany panel facing north, push the mahogany panel three times, then get the pine panel facing north and push that.  The pine panel will open, and you can head down a new tunnel to the north.  The danger here is that a wrong move will get you bludgeoned to death by a pair of statues known as the Guardians of Zork.  Needless to say, this took me a LOT of trial and error.  I was aided by my vague memories of Zork III, but even so this one took me a long time to get right.

The next area ended at a door, which I couldn't open.  With no other recourse I knocked, and the door was answered by an old man who identified himself as the Master of the Dungeon.  To pass through I would need to answer three questions that would test my knowledge of the dungeon.  Apparently I had five attempts, which was a little unclear.  Was that five attempts for each question, or between all three?

"What can be done to the mirror that is useful?"

ANSWER: TOUCH

"What object is useful in determining the function of the iced cakes?"

ANSWER: FLASK

"What is the absolute minimum specified value of the Zorkmid treasures, in zorkmids?"

ANSWER: 30,000

As can be seen in the image below, there are more questions than these three, and some of them are quite nasty.  I was lucky to get three that posed me little difficulty.  (Okay, I had to go back and count the zorkmid bills, and look at the zorkmid coin, but I got the answer in the end.)

In the next area I found a bare cell, and a parapet with a dial.  The dial had numbers from 1 to 8, and a button.  The Master followed me around wherever I went, except inside the cell.  I could even give him orders.  I did some experimenting with the dial, and found that if I turned it to a number and pressed the button, a different cell would appear.  Cell 4 had a large bronze door in the south wall, but going through it only led back to areas I had already come from.

The solution here lay with the Master.  I entered cell 4, and told him to turn the dial.  He couldn't, though, as he wasn't on the parapet.  So I led him back to the parapet, told him to stay there, and once back in the cell I was able to order him to turn the dial.  I'm surprised this worked, actually, as there aren't any other character you can order around when they're not in the same room as you.  I suppose the Master has special powers though, so he could still hear me.

After some experimenting with making the Master turn the dial, I figured out that the correct number for him to use is 6.  I opened the bronze door, and there it was: the conclusion of Zork.

That's a  pretty satisfying conclusion given the game's vintage.  It's not the most original twist, but originality is relative.  By the standards of other games of the time, this is excellent.

So, that's the mainframe version of Zork in the can.  It was a long, exhausting, often frustrating experience, but I can say without a doubt that this is the best game I've played for the blog so far.  It's fun, it's challenging, and it's iconic.  The only disappointing thing is that I had to cheat to win, but I think that I did okay.  I'm sure there are people out there who won Zork unaided, and they are better men (or women) than I.  I figured out most of the game on my own, though, and that will have to suffice.

FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: Without a doubt, this is the pinnacle of this category for the blog so far.  While the story is nothing more than a simple treasure hunt, it's elevated by  the addition of an endgame, and the best conclusion to a game in 1978.  Where this game truly shines, though, is it's setting.  Yes, the Great Underground Empire is nonsensical, but it's quirky and fun to explore.  There's a lot of great design too, with areas that link together in clever ways that are well foreshadowed.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: I've said it before, and I stand by it: as of 1978, the Thief was the all-time greatest video game antagonist.  Nothing else in text adventures or RPGs comes close.  He owes a lot to the pirate from Colossal Cave Adventure, but the Thief is  better villain in every respect, and the feeling of finally infiltrating his lair and killing him is immensely satisfying.  Still, he's only one character, and the Troll, the Cyclops and the Dungeon Master aren't up to much.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Aesthetics: As usual for text adventures I can't score this too highly, but Zork gets bonus points for atmosphere and quality writing.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Mechanics: The parser in Zork is very good, and created a lot of innovations; it may be the most sophisticated text adventure to date.  There were one or two moments where it fell down (most notably with the "EAT ME" Cake) but overall it's excellent. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: Zork has a great range of puzzles, some easy, some difficult, and some outright nasty.  It's a difficult game, but that said, none of the puzzles feel unfair.  Even the most difficult ones have some sort of clue pointing towards the solution.  Many of them had me tearing my hair out, but I was never upset about them in retrospect.  Rating: 6 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: This is one of the most influential games of all time, and although it owes a lot to Colossal Cave Adventure, it's much more well-known and wide-spread in pop culture.  Zork is an iconic game of the golden era, and gets full marks.  Rating: 7 out of 7.

Fun: Zork is loads of fun.  The puzzles are clever, the writing is witty, and both of those go a long way in a text adventure. Rating: 6 out of 7.

Zork absolutely gets the bonus point.  I've played different versions of it before, and there's no doubt that I'll play it again.  The scores above total 35, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 70.

Final Rating: 70 out of 100.

That's a high score, much higher than anything else on the list so far, but I think it's fair.  Zork is the first game I've played for the blog that could be considered a genuine classic, and it may well be the most iconic text adventure ever made.  It's absolutely deserving of the top spot in my ratings.

ADDENDUM:

Somewhat later in this blog I made the decision to overhaul my Final Rating system, so I'm going back through and fixing all of the games I've already played as of March 2020.  I've ditched the Innovation and Influence category, and replaced it for adventure games with a category for Puzzles.  I've also changed the purpose of the bonus points, saving them for games that are important, innovative, influential, or have features that are otherwise not covered by my other categories.

Also, the Final Rating is a boring name.  The CRPG Addict has his GIMLET.  The Adventure Gamers have their PISSED rating.  Data Driven Gamer has his harpoons.  So I'm ditching the generic name and calling my new system the RADNESS Index: the Righteous Admirability Designation, Numerically Estimating Seven Scores. It's a pretentious mouthful, but I'm going with it.

Puzzles: The puzzles in this game are seminal, perhaps even moreso than those from Colossal Cave Adventure (which it borrows from heavily).  It's puzzles range from dead simple to clever to frustrating to illogical, and many of them are quite amusing.  There's no doubt it has the best puzzles in the blog to this point though.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2. This is one of the most influential games of all time, even if most players of Zork encountered it in a different form.  This is the template, and the foundation upon which Infocom was built.

Zork's RADNESS Index is 64. That makes it the top-rated game on the blog so far.

NEXT: The blog may be going on something of a hiatus, because I'm dropping everything to finish The Game of Dungeons v8.  I've been playing this game since August of last year, and it's time to get this one off the books.  My character is strong, and I'm carefully plugging my way through the levels and mapping them.  If I don't finish it this time, I don't know what I'll do.  (Well, yes I do, I'll go back to the beginning and keep trying.  But I won't be happy about it.)

There are three dungeons with a special goal at the bottom of each one; I expect to do a post on the conclusion of each dungeon, so expect an update about once a fortnight.  Hopefully I'll have the game finished in a month or so.  I've just mapped level 24 of Whisenwood Dungeon, so in a week I should have a post on the conclusion of that.

Zork: Agonising Progress

You may recall from my last post that this game had me snookered.  There were a number of puzzles I was stuck on, with little idea of what to do next.  To refresh your memory, those puzzles were:

1 - The Bank

2 - The Entrance to Hades

3 - The Machine at the Bottom of the Coal Mine

4 - Getting Down Aragain Falls with the Statue

5 - The Robot

6 - The Balloon

I've made progress on most of these, albeit painstakingly.  I am trying, desperately, to complete this game with no help.  I've been helped in that by vague memories of the commercial Zork trilogy, and I feel like I'm slowly getting there.

1 - The Bank: I figured this one out through dumb luck.  As I've mentioned before, in the bank is a portrait of the chairman, which is one of the treasures I need to collect.  The portrait can't be removed from the bank by the usual exits, but it can be taken through a curtain of light leading to the north.  In my last post I reported that this curtain took me to a small room with no exits.  If you wait long enough a gnome appears, asking you for something valuable to store in a deposit box.

I tried giving the gnome a treasure, and he teleported me to the waiting room.  You can exit the room to the south, which leads back to the regular dungeon.  This is one way of getting the portrait out of the bank, but it's not the best way.  You need to give up a treasure to do this, and as far as I can tell there's no way of getting it back.

If you don't give the gnome a treasure he eventually disappears, leaving you trapped in the room.  I spent a good long while in here trying every direction possible, searching for secret doors, praying, and even trying out the magic words from Colossal Cave Adventure.  Eventually I restored my game, and when I later returned I tried WALK THROUGH WALL, and got a message asking me which wall I wanted to walk through.  I typed SOUTH, and I was back in the bank, but I still wasn't abe to leave without the portrait.  Obviously I had missed something.

For some reason, walking through the south wall doesn't work after I meet the gnome.

I tried walking through the curtain again, wanting to find the gnome, but doing so didn't take me to the same room.  Instead I was inside the vault, with a stack of Zorkmids (the local currency).  I found out the hard way that hanging around in here results in a nasty death, so after a reload I tried again, scooped up the Zorkmids, and escaped by walking through the north wall.  Now I had two treasures, neither of which I could remove from the bank.  Walking through the curtain seemed to alternate between the room where 'd met the gnome and the vault.  I couldn't figure out what to do, so I left for a while and came back later.

When I did eventually come back, I found that walking through the curtain transported me to the waiting room, every time.  So I grabbed the portrait and the Zorkmids, walked through the curtain, and was able to escape the bank with both treasures.  I'm not sure what I did, but I'll take it.

2 - The Entrance to Hades: There's a gate to Hades, with spirits that block the entrance.  You may recall that I've had some trouble solving this puzzle.  I had the right idea, remembered from the commercial version: ring the bell, light the candle, and read the book.  And yet, no matter how many times I tried this it didn't work, and I was starting to get rather aggravated about it.

Rather than stoke my rage any further, I instead downloaded a different version of the game.  Previously I had been using the version found here, which had been written in Fortran.  The version I'm using now is based on the game as written in the MDL programming language.  I my have this wrong, but my understanding is that the game was written originally in MDL, and later translated to Fortran. Both versions were constantly revised through 1981, and although they are broadly similar there are some minor differences.  I've noticed some, like the MDL version having a welcome mat that says "Welcome to Zork".  The MDL version also responds to XYZZY and PLUGH (the magic words from Colossal Cave Adventure) by calling the player a cretin.

So, with a new version of the game at hand, the first thing I tried was getting into Hades.  Sure enough, when I rang that bell the spirits quailed, and I knew I was on the right track.  After I lit the candles and read the book the entrance was unguarded.  I have no idea why this didn't work in the version I'd been using previously, but it was gratifying to see that my memory had been correct.

What I found beyond the gate was weird, and the sort of weird that is very specifically rooted in 1978.  I've mentioned before that games of this vintage love to include self-referential stuff about coding and programmers, and this might just take the cake.  What I found was "The Tomb of the Unknown Implementer", with the heads of four game developers on spikes standing before the doors.  There was a pile of empty coke bottles, and a faded printout that revealed some code.  I haven't been able to figure any of this out yet, and it seems that I can't touch the heads or the crypt without being annihilated.  Something tells me that I probably need to come back here much later.

3 - The Machine at the Bottom of the Coal Mine: At the bottom of the coal mine is a machine.  It has a compartment where an item can be placed, and a start switch.that's too small to be manipulated by my fingers.  I suspected that I could place a lump of coal inside the machine, press the button, and it would be transmuted into a diamond.  To this point I hadn't been able to turn the switch, but I thought that perhaps something from my inventory would be useful.  The first thing I tried was the screwdriver, as it seemed the most logical option.  For once logic won out in an adventure game, and my suspicions were proved correct.  I had my diamond, and one more treasure to add to my list.

4 - The Robot: And now, to another machine, found in a series of rooms at the top of a magic well.  This machine has three buttons, and pressing any of them results in electrocution.  To the south of this room is a closet, and inside the closet is a crystal sphere (another treasure).  Taking the sphere causes a cage to drop, and the room to fill with deadly gas.  It's a predicament, but luckily there's a robot nearby that will follow your orders.  Getting the sphere is a simple matter of ordering the robot into the closet with you, then telling it to lift the cage once it drops.  From there it's a simple matter to take the sphere and escape.

I'm not sure what the purpose of the three buttons is.  You can tell the robot to press them, and they seem to change the intensity of the magnetic field in a room nearby.  I'm not sure if this is important, or if I've conquered this room already.

ADDENDUM: I figured out the buttons, mostly because commenter SyoShinozaki gave me a hint that they weren't related to retrieving the sphere.  One of the buttons (I think it was the triangular one) causes in increase in the magnetic field in the room closest to the machine.  After getting the robot to press it, I left to do some more exploring only to find that the Round Room (the one that sends you to one of seven random exits) had stopped spinning.  A box had also been jarred loose from somewhere, and inside it I found a violin.  Another treasure for my collection!

5 - Aragain Falls and the Statue: Near the top of Aragain Falls is a sandy beach, and digging in the sand with a shovel uncovers a statue.  Unfortunately, the only way to get to this location is via boat, and there's no way to sail back upriver.  The only other way on is over the falls (either in a boat or a nearby barrel), which results in a messy death.

The only other thing of note at the top of the falls is the end of a rainbow.  I had previously found the other end at the bottom of a canyon, and I was sure that the rainbow could be traversed somehow. 

In the commercial version of Zork I remember using a magical sceptre, but that item is nowhere to be found in this game.  The closest thing I had found to that was a broken stick, so I picked it up and waved it.  A message came up that said "Very Good", so I felt like I was on the right track.  I took the stick to the end of the rainbow  at the bottom of the canyon and waved it once more, and this time it caused the rainbow to become solid.  Now I could traverse it from the canyon to the falls, and it was a simple matter to get the statue back to the house where I store my treasures.  I even found a pot of gold on the way back, just lying on the ground.

The presence of an "NBC Commissary" on the rainbow is an odd one.  It can't be interacted with in any way, so I gather that it's an in-joke or a reference of some sort.  The NBC logo is sort of like a rainbow, I suppose, but beyond that, I got nothin'.

6 - The Balloon: There's a hot air balloon at the bottom of the volcano, but I hadn't figured out how to get it flying.  Obviously I needed to put something flammable in its receptacle, but none of the items I had tried so far worked (coal, timber, guano).  This honestly proved much simpler than I had expected.  I tried a newspaper, thinking that it couldn't possible produce enough fire to inflate the balloon.  But, real-life logic be damned, it worked, and I was soon rising up into the volcano shaft.

Trying to fly out the top of the shaft results in death, but there are two ledges you can land the balloon on.  You need to be careful to tie the balloon to a hook when you land though, or it will float away and leave you stranded.

The first ledge has a priceless Zorkmid coin on the ground, and a passage leading to a library.  There are four books in the library, each of a different colour, but I wasn't able to read any of them.  Instead I gathered them up and dumped them in the balloon's basket.

The other ledge you can land on leads to a bare room with a metal box embedded in the wall.  The box has a hole cut in it, but for whatever reason you can't reach inside, or take a peek.  I didn't figure this out right away, but I got there eventually.  You might remember that the house on the surface contained a brick made of soft clay.  Well, it isn't made of clay, and I found that out the hard way, by burning it with my torch.  One messy explosion later, and I had discovered that it was a plastic explosive.  It seemed that I needed a fuse if I was going to use it safely, and this came in the form of the wire coil found near the stream.  Thus armed I set about blowing up all sorts of things in the dungeon.  I even tried to blow up the Thief, but the timing on that proved to be too difficult.  Eventually I hit on the idea of blowing up the box, and that dislodged it from the wall.  Inside I found a crown, and a card warning me that the area was unstable.

What followed was a comedy of errors, because there are a few ways to die here.  First the room collapses.  Then the ledge outside collapses.  I died in both of those.  I also died because I forgot to untie my balloon from the ledge, and got pulled down.  After many saves and restores I made it to the bottom, but I think I messed up anyway.  The balloon gets destroyed she you land, and the four books that I had left in the basket were still in there.  I'll probably need to go back and replay this section again, because I'm certain those books are there for a reason.

Some Other Things I Worked Out:

Earlier in the game the Thief had opened the Jewelled Egg for me, revealing a clockwork canary inside.  I hadn't twigged initially, but when I was wandering around outside I heard some bird calls, and it all came flooding back to me.  I retrieved the canary, took it into the forest, and typed WIND UP CANARY.  Sure enough, it summoned a bird which dropped a brass bauble at my feet.  I'm convinced that this puzzle lay dormant in my memory because of the extreme mental anguish it caused me in my younger days.  It's a logical puzzle, and I think enough clues are there, but it took me forever to figure it out the first time.  It's almost the perfect adventure game puzzle: obvious in retrospect but so hard to figure out beforehand.  Well screw you canary, I won this time!

After finding the sphere, I tried looking into it, because what else is a crystal sphere for?  I honestly didn;t think it would do anything, but it gave me a vision of a Dreary Room, with a red glow and a door with a key in the lock.  I have no idea where this is or how to get there.

Treasures:

So far, I've found the following treasures:

• A priceless zorkmid coin
• A crown
• A ruby
• A burned-out ivory torch
• A beautiful brass bauble
• A clockwork canary
• A trunk of jewels
• A jewel-encrusted egg
• A chalice
• A huge diamond
• A white crystal sphere
• A statue
• A pot of gold
• A jade figurine
• A sapphire bracelet
• A pearl necklace
• A grail
• A platinum bar
• A crystal trident
• A gold coffin
• A stack of zorkmid bills
• A portrait of J. Pierpont Flathead
• A painting
• A bag of coins

That's 24 treasures.  Dare I hope that I only need 25 to win?  I have 481 points out of a possible 646, so it seems unlikely.  It's back to searching, I suppose, but I am somewhat out of ideas.  Hopefully next week's post won't just be a gif of me slamming my head through my keyboard.

Zork: Stumped

So, I'm stuck on Zork.  Stumped.  Bamboozled.  Stymied.  Confounded.  Snookered.  Writing synonyms for stuck because I don't really want to acknowledge how stuck I am.  This game has me buggered, and I have no idea what to do next.

That said, while I don't know what to do I have a fair idea of where I'm supposed to do it.  So, in the interests of clarifying my problems, I'm going to run through all of the things that are giving me trouble.  Perhaps writing and thinking about them will yield some answers.

• The Bank.  There are three things of interest in the bank.  One is a curtain of light that seems to be impassable.  The second is a huge stone block that seems to be some sort of magic vault.  The other is a portrait of J. Pierpont Flathead, the bank's chairman.  This portrait is one of the treasures I need to collect (I assume so, as picking it up increased my score), but an invisible force prevents me from taking it out of the bank.  ADDENDUM: I've been able to walk through the curtain by typing WALK THROUGH CURTAIN.  I emerged in a room with no exits.  A gnome appeared, then got impatient and left when I couldn't figure out what he wanted.  I wasn't able to find my way back out of this room, so it looks like I'm stuck again.
• The Entrance to Hades: There's an entrance to Hades that is blocked by spirits who won't let me pass.  I don't know what's going on here, because I know what to do: ring the bell, light the candles and read the book (all items found in the nearby temple).  I remember it from the commercial version, and I've even looked at a walkthrough (while carefully avoiding hints for other puzzles).  It has to be correct, but none of this works when I try it.  Perhaps I can't do this yet, or perhaps the version of the game I'm using is bugged.  Either way, it's seriously irking me.
• The Machine: Deep below the coal mine there's a machine that has a compartment and a switch.  I seem to remember from the commercial version of Zork that I can put a lump of coal in here and the machine will turn it into a diamond.  I have the coal, and it fits in the compartment, but I can't operate the switch.  The description makes it seem as though my fingers are too big.  I've tried eating a cake that shrinks me, but that didn't work.
• Aragain Falls: After riding an inflatable boat down the Frigid River, I dug up a statue on the beach (one of the treasures).  The trouble is that I can't get the statue back upriver, as the current is too strong.  Aragain Falls is nearby, but dropping over the edge is a fatally bad idea.  There's a barrel at the top of the falls, and I was able to ride it down the falls, but that killed me as well.  I wonder if I can put the statue inside the barrel and push it over?  (Nope, no luck there.  I can drop the statue in the barrel, but I can;t figure out a way to move the barrel.)
• The Balloon: At the bottom of a volcano there's a basket.  Attached to the basket is a large cloth bag, a braided wire, and a receptacle.  Obviously, this is a hot air balloon, but buggered if I can get the thing to launch.  I would think that I need to put something flammable in the receptacle.  I've tried a lump of coal, some timber, various pieces of paper, the torch, a match, and even a lump of bat guano.  None of these items fit inside, and I'm otherwise out of ideas.
• The Robot: This one will take some explanation.  In one of the more remote dungeon areas there's a machine with three buttons.  These buttons are electrified, and touching them kills you.  To the south of this machine there's a closet, and inside the closet is a crystal sphere.  Taking the sphere results in the activation of a deadly gas trap.  The logical answer here is to use the robot, which will follow your commands.  The robot can survive pressing the buttons, and they seem to activate a magnet or something in another room.  None of them deactivate the trap, that's for sure.  I need to explore this more, but nothing I've tried as yet has worked.

So that's where I am, stuck on six puzzles that all have me scratching my head.  I'll keep plugging away at it, and hopefully by next week I'll have made some sort of breakthrough.  I might download a different version as well, just to see if the bell/book/candle do anything at the Entrance to Hades.  Otherwise I'm not sure what I'll do.  I was enjoying this game, but now it's edging into frustrating territory.

Zork: The Importance of Details

As I was preparing to write this post in my head, I expected it to be a very short one.  Basically, the gist of it would have been that I explored a bunch, found a couple of new areas, and made no progress whatsoever.  I was stuck for the better part of the week, with seemingly no way forward.

Admittedly, this is not uncommon for me when playing adventure games.  There will invariably come a time when I have no idea where to go or what to do next.  And when I figure out the answer (or look it up in a walkthrough, as I am known to do) it's usually something that seems dead obvious in retrospect.  I had that experience just a couple of hours ago.

But first I should write about what I did before I got stuck: exploring the maze.  There's a tried-and-true method for exploring and mapping mazes-of-twisty-little-passages-all-alike: dropping items to mark each location.  It worked wonders in Colossal Cave Adventure and I figured it would work here.

It did, to an extent, but there's an added wrinkle that makes mapping the maze in Zork a bit more difficult: the Thief.  Not only does the Thief wander through and steal your valuables occasionally, but he'll nick any treasures left unattended as well.  One of the earliest things I learned during this process was not to use any treasures for location-marking, because they inevitably get stolen.  The Thief doesn't restrict himself to stealing treasure, either.  He'll quite happily pick up other items and drop them in another location.  Basically, he's a bastard, and as of 1978 he's probably the all-time greatest villain in gaming.

The first thing I found in the maze was the skeleton of a dead adventurer, along with a rusty knife, a burned-out lantern, a set of skeleton keys, and a bag of coins.  I had never realised it before, but this is probably meant to be the protagonist of Colossal Cave Adventure; the equipment fits, especially the dagger, and he is in the one area of Zork that's an almost direct lift from its predecessor.  You can take all of the gear, but taking the skeleton is a bad idea: a ghost pops in, appalled at your desecration of a fellow adventurer, and curses you so that all of your valuables are sent to the land of the dead.  (I assume that this means they're in Hades, but as I haven't found my way in there yet it's hard to say.)

Also in the maze is a way back to the surface: a dead end with a locked grate in the ceiling.  The dead adventurer's skeleton keys unlock the grate, and then you can climb up into the forest. This is probably the exit that I use the least, as it's just too inconvenient to find my way through the maze every time I want to enter the Underground.

Much deeper in the maze, and quite difficult to find, is the lair of the Cyclops.  The Cyclops is a hostile fellow, and wouldn't let me pass.  I tried fighting him a few times, but he was a lot tougher than the Troll.  Perhaps at a higher level I'd be able to defeat him, but at my current level I was no match.  Instead I fed him my sack lunch, which he ate greedily.  Upon finishing he declared that he was thirsty, so  gave him some water.  (It seems like every adventure game so far has involved the feeding of some animal or monster.  It's become my first tactic whenever a creature is blocking my path.)

I passed through the room by climbing a flight of stairs, and found myself in a most unexpected place: the lair of the Thief!  With all of my stolen stuff!  Alas, the Thief was there as well, and he killed me very, very quickly.  Still, finding the Thief's hideout felt like a real achievement, and it's going to be so satisfying when I can come back here and jam a sword through his neck.

With the maze done, and seemingly every location that I could access mapped, I spent the next couple of days butting my head against three puzzles: the Entrance to Hades, the Dam, and the Gold Coffin.

The gold coffin is a treasure found in the Egyptian Room.  It's heavy, but you can pick it up.  The problem comes when you try to move around: it's too big to fit through certain exits, so you can't get it to the surface via any of the means I had yet discovered.  I seem to recall using a sceptre to solve this puzzle in the commercial Zork, but it ain't here in this version.  I figured out the solution eventually, but not until I had opened the Dam.

As I mentioned in the last post, there's an Entrance to Hades, with the gate guarded by evil spirits.  I'm positive that the bell, book and candle I found elsewhere are used here, but no amount of faffing about with these items has produced any sort of reaction.  I still haven't figured this out, and it's starting to eat at me.

Finally, the Dam, which is the "obvious-in-retrospect" thing I mentioned earlier.  I spent a long time trying to manipulate the control panel to open the dam, using every tool I had found, but nothing worked.  I was sure that I needed to turn the bolt on the panel, and the wrench seemed to be the likeliest item to use, but nothing worked.  Eventually I stumbled across the solution, and it really made me feel like an idiot.

Here's the problem: when I'm mapping a text adventure, I often play in SUPERBRIEF mode.  You can set Zork so that it doesn't give you the room descriptions, and only mentions the important items in the room.  I had skimmed past the dam's Maintenance Room without reading in detail, and I had missed that the room has four buttons, each with a different colour.  They're only mentioned in the room description, and in SUPERBRIEF mode they aren't flagged at all.  I was undone by my own haste in mapping, and I felt like a right twit when I discovered my error.

Exploring the dam in Superbrief mode

The buttons were coloured blue, yellow, brown and red.  The blue button causes a pipe to burst, which slowly floods the room.  You'll die if you stay in the room for too long after this, and I haven't figured out a way to shut the water off.  The brown and red buttons are seemingly useless, though I'm not ruling out the possibility that I'll need to press them later.  The yellow button produces a simple click, but when you return to the main chamber of the dam after pressing it you'll find that the control panel is activated.  With that done you can easily turn the bolt with the wrench, and open the dam.

With the dam open, the reservoir is drained, and you can cross over it on foot.  The first thing to be discovered is a trunk buried in the silt at the bottom of the reservoir: it contains some jewels, and is one of the treasures you need to collect.  There's a small air pump on the far bank of the reservoir, which solves the problem of inflating the boat that can be found at the base of the dam.  (I left the boat until much later.)  The next chamber north, the Atlantis Room, contains a crystal trident, another treasure.  Opening the dam felt like a great achievement, and that was only enhanced by the instant rewards I was given for it.

The next thing of interest that I found across the reservoir was a mirror.  I had found a similar mirror on the other side, not far from the entrance to Hades, and naturally I figured that the two were linked.  I tried breaking this one, staring into it, and walking through it, to no avail.  Finally I touched it, and a rumbling let me know that something had worked.  Sure enough, I had teleported from one mirror to the next.

This teleporting trick proved to be the solution to getting the gold coffin to the surface.  I was able to drag the coffin across the reservoir to the second mirror, teleport to the first, and then make my way into the temple.  Another thing I had discovered earlier was that praying at the altar transports you to the forest, so it was a simple matter to take the coffin and put it in my trophy case (which must be bloody ginormous).

Another thing I found on the far side of the reservoir was a slide that goes all the way back to the Cellar, the first area you see when you enter the Underground.  One of the things that elevates Zork is the way that it foreshadows various things.  The slide had been visible when I first entered the cellar, but had been too steep to climb.  I've been wondering about it for a while, and sure enough I found the top of the slide later in the game.

I also found a room that contains a jade figurine being guarded by a Vampire Bat.  The bat will grab you when you enter, and deposit you in a different location (usually somewhere in the coal mine, I found).  It's not hard to figure out how to keep it at bay, though: if you have the garlic it won't come near you, and you can claim the jade figurine.

Nearby is a  Shaft Room that has a hole covered by a grate, with a basket that you can lower into the depths.  It seemed useless at first, but like everything in an adventure game it became vital later on.

There's a room that smells of gas, in which I found a sapphire bracelet.  I suspect that if I had come in here with an open flame I would have been in trouble, but with the lantern I was able to take the bracelet with no danger.  (ADDENDUM: Yes, entering this area with the torch is fatal.)

The coal mine is probably the most annoying part of the area over the reservoir.  It's another maze, though it's mercifully smaller than the first.  There's nothing in it except a ladder leading down to another area.

In the area below I found a lump of coal, some timber, and a passage that was too narrow to enter.  I could squeeze through if I dropped all of my inventory, but that meant leaving my lantern behind, which left me trapped in the dark on the far side.  The solution involved the aforementioned basket: by placing the ivory torch in the basket and lowering it, I was able to illuminate the area beyond the narrow passage.  I'm not sure how useful it is to do so.  What I found there was a machine, with a compartment I could open and some controls that looked too small for me to manipulate.  I suspect (or perhaps remember, it's always difficult to say with games I've played before) that I need to put the coal in here so that I can transform it into a diamond, but I haven't been able to get the machine to work.

That was where my post was going to end, but I just recently figured out a few more things, so if you can stomach a few paragraphs more I'll continue.

I found the time to inflate the boat, and float downstream on the Frigid River.  You can land the boat at any time, but if you head downstream too many times you'll go over Aragain Falls to a nasty death.  There are beaches on the east and west banks.  I never found anything on the east bank, but on the west I was able to dig in the sand with my shovel and uncover a statue.  It also leads to the top of Aragain Falls, where there is a barrel with the words GERONIMO written on it.  I tried getting in the barrel and going over the falls, but it was a bad (and fatal) idea.  There's no way back upstream, so I haven't figured out how to get the statue back to the trophy case.

Near where I found the coffin is a room with a large glacier blocking the western exit.  I tried to melt it with the torch, and much to my surprise the glacier transformed into a torrent of water and swept me to my death.  Forewarned, I went back and tried throwing the torch instead.  This time the glacier melted without killing me.  I found two things on the other side: a ruby (one more treasure, huzzah), and what appeared to be a hot air balloon.  I can't get the balloon to work.  It has a receptacle, where I assume I have to put some fuel.  I've tried the coal and also some timber, but neither of them fit.  Perhaps the bat guano might work?

I also managed to go back to the Thief's room and give him the jab in the neck that he deserves.  As you score points from gaining treasures your rank increases, and so does your combat ability.  I had about 200 points when I killed the Thief.  Aside from an immense feeling of satisfaction, there are a few benefits from killing him.  The most obvious is that he doesn't roll through and take your stuff anymore.  It also allows you to reclaim any treasures that he has stolen; in addition, he has a silver chalice in his lair that you can take.  And finally (something I discovered by accident) the Thief opens the jewelled egg, to reveal a clockwork canary inside.  The egg and the canary are separate treasures, so if you kill the Thief before he does this you can't finish the game.

An ill-fated attempt to kill the Thief

Finally, I found a new area that can only be accessed from the Round Room, which sends you to certain random locations when you exit.  In this new area is a door, and you need to answer a riddle before it will open:

"What is tall as a house,

Round as a cup,

And all the king's horses can't draw it up?"

I had no trouble with this one: the answer is a WELL.  Beyond the door I found a pearl necklace, and a bucket at the bottom of a well.  The bucket was too large to take, but I was able to get inside it.  I tried filling the bucket with water, and lo and behold it rose into another area.

The rooms at the top of the well felt weird even by the standards of this game.  The first was a Tea Room, which had four slices of cake on a table: a red slice, a blue slice, an orange slice, and a slice that had EAT ME written on it.  The orange slice made me explode, so I ruled that one out.  The blue one caused me to grow too big for the room, which crushed me to death.  The red one did nothing.  I figured that the one marked EAT ME would cause me to shrink, but buggered if I could figure out how to eat the thing.  The only descriptor it had was EAT ME, and typing EAT EAT ME CAKE was - unsurprisingly - not a command that the game understood.  I managed to eat it by taking all of the other slices into another room (which allowed EAT CAKE to function as a command) but that left me without access to the cake that would return me to normal size.  I eventually hit on two solutions.  The first was to put the other cakes into the sack and close it.  The second was to use the command EAT EATME CAKE.  It's not the most intuitive thing to type, is it?  There are other ways around it, thankfully, but there's little worse in a text adventure than knowing the solution but not being able to find the correct words.

Eating the cake shrank me down, and I was able to enter some cracks and find a vial of poison.  Eating the blue cake returned me to normal.  I'm not sure what the poison is for, or whether I'll need the remaining cakes, but I'm holding on to them anyway.

The next chamber contained a robot, with instructions for bossing the thing around.  The room beyond that had a huge machine, with three buttons.  Pressing any of the buttons resulted in my electrocution, so I probably need to use the robot.  Nearby was a dingy closet containing a crystal sphere, but taking the sphere activated a trap that killed me.  Investigating this bit is next on my agenda, but I haven't had time to figure it out just yet.

So, I'm still having a grand old time with Zork.  It's undoubtedly one of the best games I've played so far, and definitely the best text adventure on my list.  I also haven't spent much time being stuck: so far I've been making constant progress.  I'm not sure if it's that I'm getting better at adventure games, or if my subconscious memory is guiding me, but I feel really clever.  I hope the next few days don't do anything to discourage me.

I have about 250 points out of 585, which suggests that I'm about halfway through the game.  That's a bit disheartening, actually.  Given that I've found fourteen treasures, I had thought I was almost done.  Either there are more than the assumed twenty treasures, or there's more to the game than a scavenger hunt.  Hopefully by my next post I'll know.