24 Facts About Zork

Zork is a text-based adventure game, first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer.

Zork was a massive success for Infocom, with sales increasing for years as the market for personal computers expanded.

Several more games in the Zork series were released beginning in 1987, as well as books and gamebooks.

In 2007, Zork was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, which formed the start of the game canon at the Library of Congress.

Zork is a text-based adventure game wherein the player explores the ruins of the Great Underground Empire to find treasure.

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The original Zork contained multiple ways of moving between the areas used in the three episodes, which were removed in favor of a single exit at the end of each game.

Zork I begins with the unnamed player character near a white house in a small, self-contained area.

Zork III follows a similar pattern to the prior two episodes, but rather than just collecting treasures for their own sake, the player character gathers the garb of the Dungeon Master to become their successor.

Zork was developed beginning in May 1977 by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling.

Zork released the port in March 1978, thereby making the game available to a wider set of players without access to a PDP-10 mainframe.

Zork felt that the game would be wildly successful and develop a cult following, and urged Infocom to produce tie-in products like maps, hints, and shirts; while the rest of the company was not convinced enough to start producing any products, they did add an object in the game that gave an address for players to mail in for maps and hints in case it proved popular.

The first sale of Zork I was earlier in the year, however; since Personal Software declined to publish the 1979 PDP-11 version of the game, Infocom announced it to various PDP-11 user groups.

Zork III was constructed by Marc Blank, who added gameplay changes and the modified point system to move the game away from straightforward dungeon exploration.

Zork II was offered to Personal Software in April 1981 and the contract was signed in June, but Infocom began to be wary of continuing the relationship with Personal Software.

InfoWorld reported in April 1984 that Zork I "has returned to the top of the sales charts two years after its release".

Zork's praised the documentation and wondered if the game could ever be completed because it "lets you do pretty much what you want to do, even if the consequences are much less than desirable".

Zork I continued to be reviewed for several years after its wide release.

Zork was listed on several lists of the best video games a decade later.

Zork has been described as "by far the most famous piece of [interactive fiction]" and "the father figure of the genre".

Game historian Matt Barton claimed that "to say that Zork is an influential adventure game is like saying the Iliad is an influential poem".

Zork went on to say that it had transcended simply influencing games and instead helped lay the foundations of concepts used throughout the medium around exploring, collecting objects, and overcoming problems.

Unofficial versions of Zork have been created for over forty years for a wide variety of systems, such as browsers or smart speakers, and decades later it is still cited as an inspiration for text interfaces such as chatbots.

Zork games have been released in several compilations in addition to Zork Trilogy.

In 1996, Threshold Entertainment acquired the rights to Zork and announced plans to create a Zork movie and live action TV series, though it was never produced.