Anybody ever a ZORK fan? How about other text-based games from the early 80s?

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> what is a grue?

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

Yes, actually I played it very recently. That was a great game. Another good text adventure was the lurking horror.

If you have never played zork or if you want to play it here is a link.
http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php

how do you play it?

Another person who remembers Zork? Damn I'm old now.

Simple, just write what you want to do (ie: "Go North", "Get Lantern" etc.)

My cousin had a bunch of old Infocom games I remember playing. There was the Enchanter/Sorcerer/Spellbreaker series.

I also had some games that had still graphic screens, but were text-based because you typed what you wanted to do. Not sure if there is a term for this type of game. For some reason I distinctly remember the game Oo-topos (sp?), a sci-fi themed adventure.

If you are interested in pursuing the text-based adventures, try this INFOCOM game site . . . if you have not played it, you are missing out . . . like a fantasy twist-a-plot book . . . .

http://www.infocom-if.org/downloads/downloads.html

I LOVED the Infocom games. I own all of them, and found them on various websites. No, I will not send them to you, NOR will I post links to where they are located.

But my favorite Infocom game IS, WAS, and always WILL BE Zork.

In my RPG campaigns (yes, me and my friends do that, on paper with pens and pencils and dice) I've even used this when people tried to find their way through a dark cave. (Although, here's an interesting point. Would an elf, or anything with infravision be able to see a grue?)

To date, I have killed 8 different characters in differing campaigns with the grue.

GRUE FOR TEH WIN! ZOMG! ZOMBIE KITTEH!

Hi everyone,

I'm new here but Zork was one of the first games that my uncle, Curt introduced me to in the late 80s. I'm 43 right now and from the time my uncle introduced me to Zork and probably somewhere between elementary and middle school, I had advanced through almost 90% of the game. From memory, I recall My uncle starting the game by selecting Zork from a text menu. As he did this, I could hear the hard drive spin as the game loaded. What I saw on the screen included a description of who made Zork and what needed to be done first to progress through the game. Being this young, it took me quite a while to figure out what some of the text even meant. I would ask my uncle all the time about what words meant and what he could do to advance in the game. I remember that one of the commands I had to learn was turn on lamp.

To this day, I'm still into a lot of the adventure games including games such as Myst. However, as a child, I was able to pick up on the text adventure quite well. I think that these games really serve a purpose and its something that todays generation is really missing out on. It's not an easy game like some of the graphics games where you have four options to choose from. My curiosity for this type of gameplay continued. I also operated a Bulletin Board Service in San Diego, CA called Quendor BBS.

Zork was like the simple form of a book, but there was also the challenge of needing to know what each word meant. Unlike today, there's no option to skip the difficult words. I had to understand every word in order to understand what was going on and what I needed to do to make my next decision. There was an incentive that by understanding what was going on, I could progress and find out what would happen next.

I had to learn to write words. Once I understood the simple commands like the cardinal directions, those commands could easily be repeated; so in that sense, learning the commands was not that difficult. But it still took time to learn the commands in the first place and then to repeat the commands again.

That was my experience with the game Zork.

Jeremiah O'Neal