[ed. I loved Zork and its predecessor Colossal Cave. Back in prehistoric times (early 80s) interactive games were just being born and Zork definitely had a big influence on my developing interest in computers.]
by Philip Bump
In my mind, the house is clapboard, with a black, precisely shingled roof and shutters in a bit of disrepair. The sky is always an intangible, faded blue, and the forest surrounding the clearing is dark green. In other words, it's always summer -- and hot, since I imagine the house surrounded by long, tan, untrampled grass.
The front door is boarded -- I pictured some plywood, though I didn't think about it much. There's the mailbox: a standard issue, gunmetal-gray, Quonset-shaped affair, slightly askew on its pole. And in the mailbox, of course, is a leaflet.
Zork was the first game I remember playing on my family's IBM PC, sometime in the early 1980s. It's hard to convey, for those who didn't go through a similar epiphany, what it was like to look into a screen empty but for a few lines of spare green text:
You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
For a kid that wasn't into fantasy books, I didn't approach it as an adventurer. I approached the game as me: I'm standing in front of a house, not unlike my own, a wrapped gift that you have to figure out how to unwrap. It was like a Choose Your Own Adventure in which no other pages were suggested. Here's where you are, kid. Now what?
What we forget, what was lost with the transition to visual games, is how literary the experience was. A quick catalog of words I learned from text adventures -- mostly from Infocom, the granddaddy of the genre: menhir, footpad, topiary, lapis lazuli. The games were written as much as they were designed; tantalizing adjectives to create a sense of the world, sometimes-obscure nouns to describe things which may not exist in real-life. They sampled from literature as well: one game, A Mind Forever Voyaging, used an excerpt from "The Raven" as an interlude.
Deep into the darkness, peering,
Long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal
Ever dared to dream before.
No English class ever inspired an appreciation for meter more than did those lines.
Read more:
by Philip Bump
In my mind, the house is clapboard, with a black, precisely shingled roof and shutters in a bit of disrepair. The sky is always an intangible, faded blue, and the forest surrounding the clearing is dark green. In other words, it's always summer -- and hot, since I imagine the house surrounded by long, tan, untrampled grass.
The front door is boarded -- I pictured some plywood, though I didn't think about it much. There's the mailbox: a standard issue, gunmetal-gray, Quonset-shaped affair, slightly askew on its pole. And in the mailbox, of course, is a leaflet.
Zork was the first game I remember playing on my family's IBM PC, sometime in the early 1980s. It's hard to convey, for those who didn't go through a similar epiphany, what it was like to look into a screen empty but for a few lines of spare green text:
You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
For a kid that wasn't into fantasy books, I didn't approach it as an adventurer. I approached the game as me: I'm standing in front of a house, not unlike my own, a wrapped gift that you have to figure out how to unwrap. It was like a Choose Your Own Adventure in which no other pages were suggested. Here's where you are, kid. Now what?
What we forget, what was lost with the transition to visual games, is how literary the experience was. A quick catalog of words I learned from text adventures -- mostly from Infocom, the granddaddy of the genre: menhir, footpad, topiary, lapis lazuli. The games were written as much as they were designed; tantalizing adjectives to create a sense of the world, sometimes-obscure nouns to describe things which may not exist in real-life. They sampled from literature as well: one game, A Mind Forever Voyaging, used an excerpt from "The Raven" as an interlude.
Deep into the darkness, peering,
Long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal
Ever dared to dream before.
No English class ever inspired an appreciation for meter more than did those lines.
Read more:
