Written by Joe Pranevich
Last month, I conquered the first real game in our marathon, Zork I. It was a good game, but it could not hold a candle to the original Dungeon. It’s time to turn our attention to its sequel, the aptly named Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz. How will the designers, Dave Lebling and Marc Blank, fare when they have to create a new game using the parts of an old one? I look forward to finding out!
Before we get to the game, there’s a bit of history to follow up on. The first Zork hit the shelves for the TRS-80 in December 1980. This was Infocom’s first product, but were they a gaming company? Or a business software company that sold games to get off the ground? This question would eventually sink Infocom several years later, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Since they still had more Zork that was not yet adapted, Dave and Marc spent much of a year building a new game around the puzzles excised from the previous one and new challenges that they were devising. Personal Software distributed the previous game, but it was clear at this point that they were not focused on marketing games. To better control the product and the messaging, Infocom brought distribution in-house and managed their own mail orders. Although Zork II wouldn’t take advantage of it, this in-house distribution system would later allow them to build the creative “feelies” that they became known for. Perhaps more so than with Zork I, this game marks the moment when Infocom became a real company: they had an office, they had their first real employee, and they were managing the sales themselves. The foundation was built for them to expand.
Full disclosure, I also played this game as a kid although I do not think that I beat it. I vaguely remember that there’s a wizard that comes by and shoots spells at you and that we’ll have to steal his wand to solve some of the puzzles, but that’s just it. My memory may be jogged as I play. If you are just joining us, you’ll probably want to read my review of Dungeon before reading this as I may skim over the solutions to puzzles introduced in that game. Let’s play!
Zork II begins immediately after the end of its predecessor. The climax of that game was discovering a secret passage into a barrow and that is where we start this one. Our trusty sword and lamp are also here, although nothing else carried over from the previous game. We didn’t enter a password or load a saved game to start this one so that makes sense. Even though I’m a native English speaker, I still had to look up what a “barrow” was: it’s an ancient burial mound. I hope you’re not too disappointed in me.
I traverse a linear path into a cavern, across a small bridge, and finally into a dark tunnel where I need to turn on the lamp. This is all new and I’m mapping carefully. Two rooms later and I’m dumped into a “Carousel Room”. The Wizard of Frobozz is here (already!), points a wand at me, and shouts, “Filch!” Whatever he was doing didn’t work and he leaves in a huff. This reminds me: he can only cast spells beginning with “F”, right? The Carousel Room is a familiar place with an unfamiliar name: it’s just the Round Room with a different name. It has eight exits and we are punted out one randomly when we leave. I’ll be on the lookout for an entrance into Wonderland to try to turn this crazy thing off. I head out a random exit into a “Marble Hall” where I pick up a clay brick. We have explosives! That means that the volcano is probably around here someplace as well and I’ll need to find something to use as a fuse. A few rooms north across a stream and up a cliff face, I find the sturdy wooden door with the keyhole from the 616-point version of mainframe Zork. I’m going to need a doormat…
Is this the way the whole game is going to go? Do we just have a new set of rooms stringing together all of the old puzzles? That would be a letdown. I won’t know until I finish mapping. Just to the west, my fears are put to rest as I discover a huge dragon blocking a path to the north. I am able to sneak west without dying to find the Bank of Zork. There are some new puzzles at least! The Wizard pops by again and successfully “Filches” my sword and I have to reload. I suspect that I’ll need that. Before I can even get back to where I was, he appears again and casts “Feeble” to cause me to drop my stuff. I’m forced to “wait” until my strength returns to normal to continue. His interjections are getting old already, but he doesn’t even stay around long enough for me to attack him.
Once I make it back, I complete the Bank puzzle just as I did before to snag the portrait and the zorkmids. Both of them have had their ASCII art descriptions replaced with prose ones. As I’ll carrying out my loot, I realize that I have no idea what the point of the game is. Is it just to gather treasure? If so, where should I be putting it? Is there a trophy case hidden somewhere? I trace a path south of there and end up in the Carousel Room from a different direction. This is as good a place as any to store my treasures, I suppose. I save my game, just in case the Wizard is the thieving type.
On my next random exit, I get lucky and find the Riddle Room! It has the same riddle as before (the answer is “well”) and I collect a pearl necklace as my reward. I realize that I can’t ascend into Wonderland yet as I do not have a bottle of water. I drop the necklace off with the rest and keep exploring.
A couple of tries later, I land in a “Cool Room” adjacent to an “Ice Room”, the game’s equivalent of the glacier. Will they bring the ivory torch back from Zork I for this or will we have to find a new solution? There’s at least a new exit up a lava tube to the “Volcano View” so I know we’ll be dealing with that soon enough. A few rooms later, it’s a “Cobwebby Room” with a piece of black string. Could that be the fuse? Yes! Now all I need are matches.
I’m still just mapping random exits from the Carousel Room and the next one takes me to a garden area. There’s three rooms here connected north to south with some evil-looking topiary at the south end and a gazebo to the north. A unicorn appears with a gold key around his neck, but there’s no obvious way to get it yet. Do I need to “filch” it with the wand? The topiary is in a variety of animal shapes including a dragon, a unicorn, a serpent, a dog, and some human figures. Are those clues to the types of monsters I’ll be facing this game? I cannot seem to interact with the topiary at all-- the game’s legendary parser doesn’t even know that word-- and I make a note to come back later.
It takes me longer than I should admit to figure out that I have to type “enter gazebo” instead a cardinal direction to get inside, but there I find a trove of useful things. There’s a newspaper with the credits, just as we saw in the previous games, plus a matchbook, a teapot, a placemat, and a letter opener. The matchbook entices us to “Visit Exotic Zork I” so no Don Woods puzzle here. The rest of the items seem to analogs to ones from Dungeon: the teapot could hold water instead of the bottle, the placemat could be used instead of the welcome mat, and the letter opener can probably push the key out. As I pick them up, I get a warning: the lamp is running out of charge. I had hoped that perhaps the lamp would be permanent this time. Just to rub it in, the Wizard appears and casts “Freeze!”. I’m stuck in place and have to wait it out. I can’t even restore my game while frozen! As soon as I can move again, I restore back. Battery charge is at a premium already.
What should I work on first? I fill the teapot with water from the stream and head to Wonderland. The whole area is a duplicate of Dungeon with only one exception: the pool and the leak in the tiny room are now tears rather than sewage. Poor Alice must be stuck someplace… I gather my candy then use the robot to disable the Carousel Room’s rotation and get the red sphere. Literally a piece of cake! I now have 110 points. After I leave, I discover that if we drop the cakes outside of Wonderland, they crumble to dust. I’m not sure if that is an improvement. They go through the trouble to ensure that you still have the “evaporate” cake after collecting the candy, but then they have it crumble to dust before it can be used again? That seems odd. The carousel is now stopped and the violin has dropped from the ceiling. 130 points, but no closer to understanding what I’m supposed to do.
The next puzzle I know how to solve is the wooden door so I head there next. My guesses were right: we place the placemat under the door then push out the key with the letter opener. Inside is the blue sphere. I peer into the sphere and see a “Murky Room” rather than the “Sooty Room” of Dungeon. I’m going to have to explore to find that so I work to full in the rest of my map. West of the Carousel Room is a “Room 8” and a can of grue repellent. Looks like a new puzzle! I’m also retroactively pleased that the exit counting that I did back in Dungeon finally amounts to something. Why set it up so you can normally find seven of the eight exits without having the eighth be interesting? Thirty years later, it seems they agree with me.
South of the Carousel Room is another area that I never hit randomly, the “Menhir Room”. The centerpiece of the room is a large rock inscribed with the letter “F” that is blocking a southwest passage. My guess is the “F” is for Frobozz, but was it put there by the Wizard? Or is it a clue that I need him (or one of his spells) to pass?
Past that is a stairway into an “Oddly Angled Room” with passages in all directions. Is this the first maze of Zork II? There’s a diamond-shaped window in each room that is either dark or dim. I explore a few rooms and discover a wooden club with the name “Babe Flathead” on it, then it clicks: baseball! I start to map it, carefully recording which windows are dim and which are not, and the Wizard pops by to tell me that I’ll “never get to first base at this rate”. He’s right because it’s pointless: the exits change. My whole map is useless because it seems that which room you end up in is randomized each time or based on a factor I haven’t worked out yet. My best guess is that I need to find a ball, hit it with the bat, and then something will happen that will make sense. Since I don’t have a ball, I leave.
That leaves only one remaining exit unexplored: a “Guarded Room” in the southwest of the map past the cobwebs. It’s guarded by a lizard head (like the topiary) and any attempt to go near it nearly gets my hand bitten off. I can’t attack it. I can’t open it. With that, I have explored everything I can. I’m going to have to solve some puzzles to advance any further.
Postscript
I was going to end here, but the next incident is so embarrassing that I can’t help but to relate it. My first puzzle to target was going to be the dragon but on my way I got napped by the Wizard with a “Fierce!” spell. I don’t think anything of it until I arrive in the dragon’s room and start attacking it on sight. He naturally burns me to a crisp and I die.
In death, I may have found the first hint as to what I am supposed to do. My spirit finds itself traveling through a red mist, then blue, white, and finally a black mist. There’s a “huge and horrible” presence there and he tells me that I may be useful to rescue him from his fate. Who is he? Not the wizard, certainly? Is this a Faustian thing where the evil (?) wizard has trapped a demon. Either way, he might not be all bad because he brings me back from the dead. I restore immediately after because I’m not ready to die yet… but do we have a glimmer of a plot?
Let’s recap! I found and solved:
Time played: 3 hr 55 min
Since this is an introduction post, don’t forget to try to guess the score. Thus far in our marathon, Dungeon has scored 41 points and Zork I only 35. Will Zork II exceed its predecessor? Could it even eclipse the original? I have no idea!
 |
| More familiar box art. |
Last month, I conquered the first real game in our marathon, Zork I. It was a good game, but it could not hold a candle to the original Dungeon. It’s time to turn our attention to its sequel, the aptly named Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz. How will the designers, Dave Lebling and Marc Blank, fare when they have to create a new game using the parts of an old one? I look forward to finding out!
Before we get to the game, there’s a bit of history to follow up on. The first Zork hit the shelves for the TRS-80 in December 1980. This was Infocom’s first product, but were they a gaming company? Or a business software company that sold games to get off the ground? This question would eventually sink Infocom several years later, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Since they still had more Zork that was not yet adapted, Dave and Marc spent much of a year building a new game around the puzzles excised from the previous one and new challenges that they were devising. Personal Software distributed the previous game, but it was clear at this point that they were not focused on marketing games. To better control the product and the messaging, Infocom brought distribution in-house and managed their own mail orders. Although Zork II wouldn’t take advantage of it, this in-house distribution system would later allow them to build the creative “feelies” that they became known for. Perhaps more so than with Zork I, this game marks the moment when Infocom became a real company: they had an office, they had their first real employee, and they were managing the sales themselves. The foundation was built for them to expand.
Full disclosure, I also played this game as a kid although I do not think that I beat it. I vaguely remember that there’s a wizard that comes by and shoots spells at you and that we’ll have to steal his wand to solve some of the puzzles, but that’s just it. My memory may be jogged as I play. If you are just joining us, you’ll probably want to read my review of Dungeon before reading this as I may skim over the solutions to puzzles introduced in that game. Let’s play!
 |
| Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am: stuck in a barrow with you. |
I traverse a linear path into a cavern, across a small bridge, and finally into a dark tunnel where I need to turn on the lamp. This is all new and I’m mapping carefully. Two rooms later and I’m dumped into a “Carousel Room”. The Wizard of Frobozz is here (already!), points a wand at me, and shouts, “Filch!” Whatever he was doing didn’t work and he leaves in a huff. This reminds me: he can only cast spells beginning with “F”, right? The Carousel Room is a familiar place with an unfamiliar name: it’s just the Round Room with a different name. It has eight exits and we are punted out one randomly when we leave. I’ll be on the lookout for an entrance into Wonderland to try to turn this crazy thing off. I head out a random exit into a “Marble Hall” where I pick up a clay brick. We have explosives! That means that the volcano is probably around here someplace as well and I’ll need to find something to use as a fuse. A few rooms north across a stream and up a cliff face, I find the sturdy wooden door with the keyhole from the 616-point version of mainframe Zork. I’m going to need a doormat…
Is this the way the whole game is going to go? Do we just have a new set of rooms stringing together all of the old puzzles? That would be a letdown. I won’t know until I finish mapping. Just to the west, my fears are put to rest as I discover a huge dragon blocking a path to the north. I am able to sneak west without dying to find the Bank of Zork. There are some new puzzles at least! The Wizard pops by again and successfully “Filches” my sword and I have to reload. I suspect that I’ll need that. Before I can even get back to where I was, he appears again and casts “Feeble” to cause me to drop my stuff. I’m forced to “wait” until my strength returns to normal to continue. His interjections are getting old already, but he doesn’t even stay around long enough for me to attack him.
 |
| The Wizard, as he appeared on the C64 manual cover. |
Once I make it back, I complete the Bank puzzle just as I did before to snag the portrait and the zorkmids. Both of them have had their ASCII art descriptions replaced with prose ones. As I’ll carrying out my loot, I realize that I have no idea what the point of the game is. Is it just to gather treasure? If so, where should I be putting it? Is there a trophy case hidden somewhere? I trace a path south of there and end up in the Carousel Room from a different direction. This is as good a place as any to store my treasures, I suppose. I save my game, just in case the Wizard is the thieving type.
On my next random exit, I get lucky and find the Riddle Room! It has the same riddle as before (the answer is “well”) and I collect a pearl necklace as my reward. I realize that I can’t ascend into Wonderland yet as I do not have a bottle of water. I drop the necklace off with the rest and keep exploring.
A couple of tries later, I land in a “Cool Room” adjacent to an “Ice Room”, the game’s equivalent of the glacier. Will they bring the ivory torch back from Zork I for this or will we have to find a new solution? There’s at least a new exit up a lava tube to the “Volcano View” so I know we’ll be dealing with that soon enough. A few rooms later, it’s a “Cobwebby Room” with a piece of black string. Could that be the fuse? Yes! Now all I need are matches.
I’m still just mapping random exits from the Carousel Room and the next one takes me to a garden area. There’s three rooms here connected north to south with some evil-looking topiary at the south end and a gazebo to the north. A unicorn appears with a gold key around his neck, but there’s no obvious way to get it yet. Do I need to “filch” it with the wand? The topiary is in a variety of animal shapes including a dragon, a unicorn, a serpent, a dog, and some human figures. Are those clues to the types of monsters I’ll be facing this game? I cannot seem to interact with the topiary at all-- the game’s legendary parser doesn’t even know that word-- and I make a note to come back later.
 |
| We found the credits! |
It takes me longer than I should admit to figure out that I have to type “enter gazebo” instead a cardinal direction to get inside, but there I find a trove of useful things. There’s a newspaper with the credits, just as we saw in the previous games, plus a matchbook, a teapot, a placemat, and a letter opener. The matchbook entices us to “Visit Exotic Zork I” so no Don Woods puzzle here. The rest of the items seem to analogs to ones from Dungeon: the teapot could hold water instead of the bottle, the placemat could be used instead of the welcome mat, and the letter opener can probably push the key out. As I pick them up, I get a warning: the lamp is running out of charge. I had hoped that perhaps the lamp would be permanent this time. Just to rub it in, the Wizard appears and casts “Freeze!”. I’m stuck in place and have to wait it out. I can’t even restore my game while frozen! As soon as I can move again, I restore back. Battery charge is at a premium already.
What should I work on first? I fill the teapot with water from the stream and head to Wonderland. The whole area is a duplicate of Dungeon with only one exception: the pool and the leak in the tiny room are now tears rather than sewage. Poor Alice must be stuck someplace… I gather my candy then use the robot to disable the Carousel Room’s rotation and get the red sphere. Literally a piece of cake! I now have 110 points. After I leave, I discover that if we drop the cakes outside of Wonderland, they crumble to dust. I’m not sure if that is an improvement. They go through the trouble to ensure that you still have the “evaporate” cake after collecting the candy, but then they have it crumble to dust before it can be used again? That seems odd. The carousel is now stopped and the violin has dropped from the ceiling. 130 points, but no closer to understanding what I’m supposed to do.
 |
| Follow along with this trusty map! Gold is a treasure; Red is an unsolved puzzle. |
The next puzzle I know how to solve is the wooden door so I head there next. My guesses were right: we place the placemat under the door then push out the key with the letter opener. Inside is the blue sphere. I peer into the sphere and see a “Murky Room” rather than the “Sooty Room” of Dungeon. I’m going to have to explore to find that so I work to full in the rest of my map. West of the Carousel Room is a “Room 8” and a can of grue repellent. Looks like a new puzzle! I’m also retroactively pleased that the exit counting that I did back in Dungeon finally amounts to something. Why set it up so you can normally find seven of the eight exits without having the eighth be interesting? Thirty years later, it seems they agree with me.
South of the Carousel Room is another area that I never hit randomly, the “Menhir Room”. The centerpiece of the room is a large rock inscribed with the letter “F” that is blocking a southwest passage. My guess is the “F” is for Frobozz, but was it put there by the Wizard? Or is it a clue that I need him (or one of his spells) to pass?
 |
| This is what a menhir is. I didn’t know either. |
Past that is a stairway into an “Oddly Angled Room” with passages in all directions. Is this the first maze of Zork II? There’s a diamond-shaped window in each room that is either dark or dim. I explore a few rooms and discover a wooden club with the name “Babe Flathead” on it, then it clicks: baseball! I start to map it, carefully recording which windows are dim and which are not, and the Wizard pops by to tell me that I’ll “never get to first base at this rate”. He’s right because it’s pointless: the exits change. My whole map is useless because it seems that which room you end up in is randomized each time or based on a factor I haven’t worked out yet. My best guess is that I need to find a ball, hit it with the bat, and then something will happen that will make sense. Since I don’t have a ball, I leave.
That leaves only one remaining exit unexplored: a “Guarded Room” in the southwest of the map past the cobwebs. It’s guarded by a lizard head (like the topiary) and any attempt to go near it nearly gets my hand bitten off. I can’t attack it. I can’t open it. With that, I have explored everything I can. I’m going to have to solve some puzzles to advance any further.
Postscript
I was going to end here, but the next incident is so embarrassing that I can’t help but to relate it. My first puzzle to target was going to be the dragon but on my way I got napped by the Wizard with a “Fierce!” spell. I don’t think anything of it until I arrive in the dragon’s room and start attacking it on sight. He naturally burns me to a crisp and I die.
 |
| I died. |
In death, I may have found the first hint as to what I am supposed to do. My spirit finds itself traveling through a red mist, then blue, white, and finally a black mist. There’s a “huge and horrible” presence there and he tells me that I may be useful to rescue him from his fate. Who is he? Not the wizard, certainly? Is this a Faustian thing where the evil (?) wizard has trapped a demon. Either way, he might not be all bad because he brings me back from the dead. I restore immediately after because I’m not ready to die yet… but do we have a glimmer of a plot?
Let’s recap! I found and solved:
- Wonderland, scoring some candy and a red sphere.
- I stopped the carousel to get the violin and grue repellent.
- The locked wooden door, nabbing a blue sphere.
- The Bank of Zork, stealing a portrait and some zorkmid bills.
- Fire-breathing dragon.
- Lizard-headed door.
- The glacier which probably leads to the volcano.
- The “Oddly Angled” maze
- The “F” Menhir and the southwest passage behind it.
- The unicorn and the topiary garden.
- Whatever we’re supposed to do with the Wizard.
Time played: 3 hr 55 min
Since this is an introduction post, don’t forget to try to guess the score. Thus far in our marathon, Dungeon has scored 41 points and Zork I only 35. Will Zork II exceed its predecessor? Could it even eclipse the original? I have no idea!