#Online text adventure zork for free#
You can play the original Zork for free here and I highly recommend that you do. I must warn you, Legends of Zork is set in the same universe but not a text adventure by any means. The franchise is still continued with a casual persistent MMO browser based version of Zork that began in April 2009. No matter how far we have moved on into high resolution, face blistering feasts for the eyes, games today still claim descendancy from these heady ideals of telling a story that people would love. This game began the dynasty from which modern gaming can claim it’s heritage. Zork, the first Infocom game, was created at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling in 1977. Adventure eventually gave inspiration to the behemoth Infocom, arguably the greatest text adventure publisher ever to exist. It was created by Will Crowther and kick started an entire genre. The first text adventure was called simply Adventure owing to the well documented shortage of catchy names in the seventies. Sometimes, an in depth and well crafted interactive fiction can be just as satisfying as using a spectacularly modeled, surreal weapon to convert a beautifully animated alien killing machine into something liposuction surgeons throw out at the end of a day.
Text adventures can be great in much the same way the novel is almost always better than the film: if only out of virtue of being able to create Harry Potter in your own mind, rather than watching some bespectacled oik grow hair in embarrassing places year after year.Ī well oiled imagination can be relied on to provide vivid imagery, not surprising considering that it is the filter the real world must pass through before reaching your conscious experience. Some wise people even see graphics based computer games as a step backwards, the equivalent of drawing pictures on cave walls in comparison to the Illiad. Some of the first computer games in existence are text adventures and when done correctly they can be as engrossing, inspiring and as horrifying as any novel. Text adventures, or interactive fiction, are old, really old.