Trivia / Zork

• Covers Always Lie: The Implementors at Infocom absolutely hated the original packaging for Zork. When the game was being published and distributed by Personal Software Inc., the packaging illustration◊ prominently featured a stereotypical D&D barbarian hero type. This is definitely not your player character in Zork. And the Imps wanted to move away from the Gygax "gamer" imagery that existed at the time; They were also seriously interested in not being solely known as just a computer game company . When Infocom took over publishing, enter the classic packaging with the brick fonts and wooden doors.
• Feelies: As became standard for Infocom games, all the text-based Zork games after the original trilogy came with several feelies. Almost all were essential for completing their respective game.
• Port Overdosed:
  • Both the original Zork and Enchanter trilogies have appeared on practically every computer platform ever made. Infocom built its business around the idea that they could write their adventures for a custom virtual machine (the Z-Machine) and then write a player application for each new system; Infocom themselves ported games to over two dozen different machines. Many early computers had either extremely limited or no proper graphics modes at all, but could display text very well. While initially the system requirements were relatively steep (a floppy drive and 48KB of RAM when tape drives and 16KB of RAM were common), the increasing power of home computers caught up with that relatively quickly.
  • On top of Infocom's official ports, the text-based Zork and Enchanter games can be played in multiple open-source Z-Machine interpreters that have been ported to pretty much anything with a screen, 128KB of storage, and a way to enter text. Interpreters available include:
    • Game Boy
    • Game Boy Advance
    • Texas Instrument TI-89 calculators
    • Palm Pilot (and other PDAs)
    • Amazon Kindle (and other e-readers)
    • Any modern web browser
  • Zork is so port overdosed you can actually play the game inside another game. There's a trick you can use to wander around the main menu of Call of Duty: Black Ops, where you'll find a computer console that, in addition to copious in-universe emails and government files, contains the entirety of Zork.
• Reality Subtext: Zork: the Undiscovered Underground is filled with this. It's a melancholic, rather gloomy affair where the Underground Empire's ruins are falling apart, several artifacts from the original trilogy are covered in dust or broken, even your trusty lamp needs a few smacks before it sparks back to life, the Grues are going hungry, and you can even find statues of the implementors (aka original creators) talking about the decline of text games and modern graphical adventure games and wondering if there's a place for them anymore. Indeed, it was the last traditional text adventure in the series and was commissioned by Activision as a prequel to Zork: Grand Inquisitor.

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