Zork I: The Great Underground Empire

Zork I: The Great Underground Empire is one of the founding works of the text adventure genre, and its Commodore 64 version brought the legendary Infocom parser to owners of the eight-bit machine as well. With no graphics at all, the player explores a vast underground empire full of traps, puzzles, trolls, and treasures, communicating with the game through typed commands processed by an advanced text parser that understood relatively complex sentences rather than just simple verb-noun pairs, which was common among competitors at the time.

The gameplay rests on carefully examining the surroundings, collecting items, solving logical puzzles, and gradually building a mental map of the world, since the game offers no auto-map or hints of any kind. It's also famous for its dry English humor and its occasional merciless killing of the player who doesn't proceed carefully enough — saving and frequent backups of one's position were as much part of an experienced player's basic toolkit as pencil and paper for drawing the map. On the Commodore 64 the game ran from disk with no major changes compared to other platforms, since all the content was textual and independent of the graphical power of any particular machine, relying only on a virtual machine called the Z-machine.

Zork I was both a commercial and a critical phenomenon at release and helped define the entire genre of interactive fiction on personal computers for years to come. Its influence is visible across a whole generation of later text and graphic adventures, which borrowed both its puzzle structure and its distinctive narrative style and dry humor typical of Infocom's output. The game was, after all, the first entry in a loose trilogy, and many of its puzzles, locations, and solutions have stayed in players' memory to this day as a widely shared cultural legacy of the whole genre. Today the game will appeal mainly to players interested in the history of game storytelling and puzzle design — without knowledge of English and patience for the period parser, though, access to it is fairly difficult, even if the reward of a well-thought-out world is worth it.

Why play it: For players interested in the history of game storytelling and puzzle design, Zork I is a defining work that shaped the entire text adventure genre, though it demands English and patience with the period parser.