from Zork 1
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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You are likely to be eaten by a grue, if this predicament seems particularly cruel, consider who's fault it could be, not a torch or a map in your inventory!
When I first started playing D&D 30 fucking years ago I used to take my hand drawn maps of Zork to school and use those as dungeon maps for my friends and I to play on in the back of class. Goddamn its been a long time, but I owe A LOT to Zork.
Is this the one where you get eaten by a grue?
Only if the lights are out.
Want some rye? Course ya do!
Going back I stuck in my head for days. Thank you!
Sweet, I've been looking forward to some quality-of-life improvements and the addition of new roguelike mechanics forever
So can I get the solution to Zork on the C64 now :-D
Are games with semantic text input any fun? They look like they'd be tremendously frustrating as a modern gamer. I guess you need to learn the language it's looking for?
They were tremendously frustrating back then too. And we had no fucking internet and if you didn't have a buddy who knew how to beat the game you be calling a 900 number tipline lol.
The commands aren’t very complicated. You’re mostly looking at stuff, taking stuff, or using items on stuff. It’s usually just [verb] [noun] type simple 2 word sentences.
The hard part of Zork is figuring out where to go and what to use where. Navigation in the game is usually by compass directions but the map is not a plain grid, so you can go north and then go west and end up right back ever you started for odd reasons. You’re highly encouraged to make your own map on paper, in addition to lots of notes about things you saw in each area.
The game even includes a maze, a reference to the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure’s “maze of twisty passages, all alike.” Navigating it is a real challenge!
A paper map sounds fun! I'll try. Thank you for the tips.
I liked them but I also grew up with Choose Your Own Adventure books. You might try some of the hybrid games like Kings Quest that have graphics and use arrow keys but also use a parser for input.
I've tried one King's Quest game and found it frustrating, but that was years ago. Maybe could try again.
I unfortunately don't have much time to play games.
I've tried Zork a few times, but I always get stuck near some clearing, and I don't know where to go. Basically at the start.
Anyway, curiosity combined with imagination, yeah, could be fun.
Main reason I haven't tried it is pretty stupid. I don't know how to save and reset, otherwise Zork is also on our SDF pubnix. But I also didn't really go out looking. You can try it without sign-up on telehack.com. Also, why the hell can't I run telnet (freezes or takes long time to respond) on Arch + KDE in terminal emulator (I tried 2), but it works in TTY?
And a list of many BBSs: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
I'll give them a shot, thank you.
I learned how to "write" in Grafiti for my Palm Pilot, and I've learned how to best phrase my searches, so I can learn this.
I'd forgotten about those games. Played a little in college in the 80s.
Off to Frobozz I go, I guess