But yeah, I agree with you. I seem to have liked the game more than you did, but I literally remembered nothing about playing it except the triumph I felt when I solved the Double Fanucci puzzle.
Machines like the Macintosh and Amiga, however, were barely idling when running a typical Infocom text-only game, and could easily support graphics as well without losing anything. Zork Zero was quite well-received by the Macintosh magazines, but that platform was far from the commercial sweet spot in gaming. I enjoyed Zork Zero, but I think I enjoyed it in spite of the puzzles. I mention it here because – although certainly necessary – that couldn’t have helped its sales. and The Mulldoon Legacy, which start you in a constrained space and gradually expand in scope as you solve puzzles. Zork Zero is a 1988 interactive fiction game written by Steve Meretzky and published by Infocom. While not a disaster in the writing department, Zork Zero tends more toward the latter than the former for me.
Instead of an illustration for each room, the graphics take the form of decorative borders, an illuminated onscreen map, some graphical puzzles (solvable using a mouse), and only a few illustrations for illustrations’ sake. As the name implies, a prequel to the Zork trilogy. Much of it is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz, a really nice adventure game sold in 1989 for DOS, is available and ready to be played again! The idea’s trump card, however, was the unique commercial appeal most still believed the Zork trademark to possess. As you point out, Meretzky embraced the Flathead/GUE lore stuff, and it would have been easy enough to give the game some actual plot arising from it. Thanks for this.
But yeah. Zork Zero is a difficult game, and too often difficult in ways that really aren’t that much fun.
Blue Flame Labs. Yep, I was quite young when I played it too, and hadn’t encountered these chestnuts either. Visit this site’s companion site, The Analog Antiquarian, for chronicles of worldly wonders. Jumping-peg puzzles should never be used as a roadblock in a game though. The double “next” in this sentence is intended? It’s sad that there are so many late Infocom games with great potential that never reached it because of the company’s troubles.
Here you’ll find collected in ebook format for offline reading most of the articles already published on this site. Unlike the Zork trilogy, the game is not written by Marc Blank and David Lebling. But still more restrictive was the limitation on the size of what Infocom called the “pre-load,” that part of the story data that could change as the player played, and that thus needed to always be in the host machine’s memory. Yes, I’m sure a few people would have been (or rather *claimed* to have been without actually playing it) offended, but at least in the West, such people are a thankfully tiny percentage of the population. Bruce Davis grew ever more frustrated and irate at the delays; a contemporary memo calls him a “looming personality” and notes how he is forever “threatening a tantrum.” A desperate-sounding “Proclamation” went out to the rank-and-file around the same time: “The one who can fix the bugs of Zork Zero, and save the schedule from destruction, shall be rewarded with half the wealth of the Empire.” Signed: “Wurb Flathead, King of Quendor.”. Some of the puzzles, probably even most of them, are fine enough in themselves, but there is a sprinkling of questionable ones, and all are made immeasurably more difficult by the fact that trying out a burst of inspiration can absorb 50 moves simply transiting from one side of the world to the other.