The Zork Anthology

Zork is impressive in that it can actually feel like an adventure into the unknown despire having little to no graphics. It's little more than interactive story telling, but it can draw you in if you're patient. This series should only be played for nostalga. If you don't like text adventures then you won't like Zork. However, it's a great adventure and if you're willing to give it a chance, it can be great fun. Stay in the light GOG!

Read the title. If you fancy some migraine inducing, but still possible and clever puzzles, completely off-beat and frequently hilarious writing with a curiously interesting and involving storyline then buy these. Even without graphics or any gameplay more involving than typing in a small set of commands these are still some of the greatest and most involving games ever. Hopefully GOG will take advantage of the rest of the Infocom lineage; a huge library of excellent text adventures and some bizzare graphic adventures would make excellent aditions. Those, and Return to Zork, Zork Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor - such a weird set of games that they all must be played at least once.

Way back in 1981 I bought my first computer, an Apple ][, along with a disk drive that held a whopping 335k of data and three games. Scott Addams adventures 1-3, 4-6 and Zork. It was all text but what an incredible picture it painted. I have bought in many times since then and I have never regretted a single purchase of this game. These are text games (except for some rudimentary graphics in Zork Zero) and you will communicate with the game through the infocom parser, one of the best there ever was. The original Zork was written for a mainframe at M.I.T. and was quite long. It was split into 3 parts when it was released for the microcomputers of the day. This game, along with Colossal Cave, Pong and Space Invaders, form the foundation of every computer game that has ever been published. The puzzles are fiendishly clever, but not impossible. Just remember to save often because this is an old school game and getting killed is very common. People who only know adventure games of the last 10-15 years may find this game difficult. In general, games of this era had a fairly high difficulty factor. Still, this is a classic and no one who wants to consider themselves a gamer can do so without experiencing the wonder of the Great Underground Empire. What are you waiting for? Get that Brass Lantern and the Sword and get to exploring!

Infocom is famous for its text adventures (or "interactive fiction", as they were advertised), starting with Zork. All text: no graphics. You type your commands into the parser -- Infocom had the best parser ever (still the best since nobody makes parsers any more!) They are mostly fiendishly difficult -- without the hint books or walkthoughs they can literally take years to finish. I never beat Zork II or III without a walkthrough, and Zork 1 took me a decade. They are truly an immersive text experience, like a novel. And they're hilarious. I love them all. Unfortunately all of the legal re-releases by Activision, who took over after Infocom went bankrupt, have been sloppy and incomplete, and the Zork Anthology is no exception. All except Leather Goddesses of Phobos were rereleased in "Lost Treasures of Infocom" and "Lost Treasures of Infocom II", and all except Hitchhiker's Guide and Shogun were released in "Masterpieces of Infocom". It would be good if GOG could get these. But it would be better if someone would make a curated and COMPLETE release. Zork Anthology does include all the critical documentation, which Lost Treasures and Masterpieces did not. But not the hint books, which they did. You can get better copies of the documentation and the hint books off the Internet. There's another way this GOG release was incompetently done. The Infocom games used a virtual machine (the "Z-machine") for portability, so once you have the game files, it is best to download a modern Z-machine to play them with. Instead, this release packages the original 1980s IBM PC Z-machine interpreter with DOSBox for Windows, which is stupid and creaky. If you buy it, extract the actual game files (one file per game!) and get a modern Z-machine interpreter (I use "frotz" on Linux). The games are *the best*. But there really needs to be a professionally curated re-release.