Introducing The Great Zork Marathon

Written by Joe Pranevich

The greatest dam in adventure game history.

Hello, Sailor! Before we get into 1992, we want to peek ahead just for a moment to 1993 and a monumental release: Return to Zork. No one can deny that the Zork games were some of the most successful and influential adventure games of all time. They spawned a franchise that included multiple series of games, books, and toys. They were parodied by some developers but imitated by many more. Next to Colossal Cave itself, I don’t think there were games more influential on our genre than Zork.

And yet, because they were text adventures, we haven’t played any of them. Trickster’s only text adventure review was Colossal Cave, but he wrote it for RetroSmack instead of our fine publication. We’ve played a few text adventures since the Great Relaunch, but we haven’t played any of the Zork games… until now.

This is my challenge: I will play and review every Zork game before the blog makes it to Return to Zork. Considering that it took me nearly six months to play four games in my “Summer of Questprobe” series, I may be biting off more than I should. But I want to give it a try!

“You are west of a white house with a boarded front door…”

Every good marathon needs to have a map, and these are the stops that I hope to take along the way:

1. Dungeon (1979)
2. Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (1980)
3. Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz (1981)
4. Zork III: The Dungeon Master (1982)
5. Enchanter (1983)
6. Possible Side Trip: Planetfall (1983)
7. Possible Side Trip: Zork game books (1983-1984)
8. Sorcerer (1984)
9. Spellbreaker (1985)
10. Possible Side Trip: Wishbringer (1985)
11. Possible Side Trip: Stationfall (1987)
12. Beyond Zork (1987)
13. Zork Zero (1988)
14. Zork Quest: Assault on Egreth Castle (1988)
15. Possible Side Trip: Zork parodies, Pork (1988) and Pork 2 (1989)
16. Zork Quest: The Crystal of Doom (1989)
17. Possible Side Trip: Zork novels (1988-1991)

Want some rye?

This list includes all of the games in the Zork and Enchanter series plus a few surprise “side trips”. Wishbringer appears to take place in the Zork universe, although I haven’t played it to know how explicit this connection is. Planetfall and Stationfall may take place in the far future of Zork due to the presence of grues, plus they have been included in Zork anthologies. I also would like to briefly look at the various Zork books as I had several of them as a kid and I’d like to see if they hold up at all. And finally, just in the event that I somehow come in ahead of schedule, I put spots in there for a quick look at the Pork series, a well-known parody of Zork.

Am I crazy? YES. Am I going to try anyway? Absolutely.

Even once this marathon is over, Zork fun will not be. Several additional Zork games will be played in future years of The Adventure Gamer, including Zork Nemesis (1996), Zork: The Undiscovered Underground (1997) and Zork: Grand Inquisitor (also 1997). Undiscovered Underground is a text adventure released with Grand Inquisitor and we’ll solve how we cover that when the time comes. An online-only sequel was released in 2009, Legends of Zork, but it has been shut down by Activision and no offline version is known to exist. It will be a very long time before we get to 2009 games so by the time we get there, we may have a way to discuss it.

Please join me next week as I kick off this series with the mainframe game that started it all, Dungeon, otherwise known as unnumbered Zork.