Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor

Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor was released by Infocom in 1987 as one of the last major text adventures of its era and, at the same time, as a title that tried to push the genre further in the direction in which the emerging graphical RPGs were heading at the time. Unlike earlier games from the world of Zork, Beyond Zork adds role-playing elements: the character has their own attributes such as strength, dexterity or intelligence, gains experience and gradually grows stronger over the course of the game, which was an unusual step for a purely text adventure of the time and, within Infocom, more of an exception than the rule.

The game is still controlled by typing commands in natural language, but Infocom added an automatically generated map of the explored territory, which helped players find their way around the vast underground world of Quendor. Previously it had been the norm for players to draw maps by hand on paper based on the descriptions of individual rooms. The story builds on the mythology of the earlier Zork games and sends the player after a legendary coconut that is the key to solving the main adventure, with plenty of puzzles, traps and fights along the way, resolved by means of the newly introduced character system, where it matters how well trained the character has been so far and how well equipped with suitable items and spells.

At the time of release, it was an ambitious attempt to revive a genre that was already starting to give way to graphical adventures, and critics and players alike appreciated Infocom's effort to combine traditional text storytelling with RPG mechanics, even though it also kept classic elements such as rich room descriptions and the clever logic puzzles for which Infocom was famous. The authors also put a good dose of humour and references to earlier instalments of the series into the game, so long-time fans of the Zork games could discover plenty of small allusions to older stories. Today Beyond Zork is interesting above all as evidence of how the company tried to find new paths for the text adventure just before the genre was gradually pushed aside on the PC by games with a graphical interface and the mouse as the main means of control.