Posts tagged zork 
The Game Archaeologist discovers the Island of Kesmai
It was the mid-'80s, and I was just a kid in love with his family's IBM PC. Not having a wealth of capital at the time, I relied on hand-me-down copies of software that rolled in from friends and family and probably the Cyber-Mafia. Practically none of the disks came with instructions (or even ...
The Game Archaeologist plays with MUDs: The history
You know that sinking feeling when you get into something that's way, waaaay over your head and you have no choice but to swim furiously or drown? That's exactly how I felt when I started to do research for this month's series on MUDs -- Multi-User Dungeons -- and their descendants. At first I ...
New Zork game no longer an MMO
If you've been following along with the site, you may remember a story we ran on a brand new Zork game, and the press release that told us that it was to be a casual MMO. In fact, we believe the exact sentence was "designed to provide gamers with a casual MMO game they can play on their laptop, ...
Zork to return in MMO form
If you're old like me, you may remember the classic world of Zork. It was a text-based adventure game (and series of games) created in the late 70s that was the inspiration for most, if not all, story-rich computer games of our day. Well, now it will be coming to an internet browser near you as a ...
Splashing through the MUD and the MUSH
Before forum trolls complained of bad graphics or crappy voice acting, there was text-based gaming. Progressing from the success of games like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the multi-user dungeons (MUDs) and multi-user shared hallucinations (MUSHes) were our best methods of ...
Animations to die for
I was chatting with a friend the other day (shut up! I do too have friends!) and we were playing reference poker -- you know, someone makes a comment referring to some aspect of pop culture, and the other person replies in kind. She said ' ... you are eaten by a grue.' I made the obligatory Zork ...
LotRO quest inspired by Apple II text adventures
It seems that most gamers these days haven't played any of the old Apple II computer games, much less the particularly ancient text-based adventure ones. Most people now see them as arcane and even intimidating. Those black & white fossils bear no relation to something as modern as say, The ...
