Three videos of a Youtuber called SwimYBO going through all three of Infocom’s classic Zork games. Zork was originally made for the PDP-10 by a number of students at MIT as a larger and funnier version of Colossal Cave, and was made all as one game. When remade for a variety of home microcomputers at the time, it was written in a special language, ZIL, for a virtual machine called the Z Machine. So, the game writers wrote their games once for ZIL, which had a Z Machine written for each of the target platforms. This explains how they were able to relatively easily port for every platform under the sun, back when there were over a dozen, and also why most of their games looked like they were the output of a simple terminal emulator.
Infocom was bought by Activision, used as a brand for a number of weird titles like an NES game, and eventually the Zork name would be applied to a pair of Windows graphicadventures. The property currently lies dormant in the hands of an uncarring megacorp, along with many other old computer game settings, characters and properties from over the proliferating decades of time since Pong.
Anyway. SwimYBO’s playthroughs go through the entire game and reveal all the puzzles and solutions, but they do leave some of the descriptions and game lore unrevealed for a player who might come to them later.
Zork I (“The Great Underground Empire,” 29 minutes):
I’m trying to include these timelines whenever I make a post about something that’s gone on for a bit
Okay, this is mostly from memory, so here goes. And it’s impossible to talk
about this subject without launching into a discursive and random mode of writing that may be funny but often comes off as annoying if one doesn’t have the writing skill of a Footlights alum who was friends with the Pythons (Monty) and once script-edited for classic Doctor Who. I apologize for that, but understand that reading the book version in large part warped my writing style for decades. I think I’ve gotten better since then, but I doubt it.
So in the beginning Douglas Adams created a hilarious sci-fi comedy radio show called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then there was an album, then a TV show, then most improbably, a text adventure game from Infocom back at their height. One might think, surely a movie is next, right? And you’d be correct (2005), but because Hollywood is a twisty maze of executives all alike, only after 13 years after the last book had passed (1992), along with the life of Douglas Adams (2001), and somehow from the Disney company (still around).
Brushed aluminum styling!
The history of the whole thing is involved, and I already covered much of it in a previous post. This post is just to point out the updated, 30th Anniversary edition of the web version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the BBC’s website. It replaced the 20th Anniversary edition. If they keep to the pattern, there should soon be a 40th Anniversary edition, but there’s been no sight of one yet.
A long time ago, there was a radio series called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was about a man named Arthur Dent, who with the aid of his friend Ford Prefect managed to escape from the Earth when it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, after which he went to have increasingly weird and ridiculous adventures.
At the center of the story was an electronic book named, like the radio series itself, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was like an iPhone and Wikipedia combined into one device, only Douglas Adams somehow thought of them in 1978, which was the same year Space Invaders was being manufactured. It was written by a brilliantly funny man named Douglas Adams. Adams also wrote some scripts for Doctor Who, and some other books, including The Meaning of Liff, Last Chance to See and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
Before he wrote those other books though, he wrote some more about the Hitchhiker’s Guide. He wrote a TV series based on the radio series. There was also a vinyl recording, which was simply called an album then because CDs hadn’t been invented yet. Each of these versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has substantial differences from all the others. Then Douglas Adams met Steve Meretzky, and the two of them did a computer game version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, itself with major differences from the other versions.
They made the game for a company called Infocom. Infocom was one of the first great successes in computer gaming. They wrote what they called interactive fiction, but could more generally be called text adventures. They presented the world of the game as text on a screen, like you were reading a book, and you expressed what you wanted the protagonist character to do by typing commands. Sort of like those things some inaccurately call AIs, and are more properly called Large Language Models, or LLMs, except a person actually wrote everything that can happen, and there’s a point to them.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the second best-selling game that Infocom ever did, after Zork. It sold over a million copies, a gigantic success at the time, and still pretty good today. So everyone was keen to do a second Hitchhiker’s Guide game. The game even says, at the end, that an incredible adventure was about to happen, but you’d have to buy the next game to find out what it was.
Time passed….
Infocom tried to get Douglas Adams to create a sequel. He did co-write Bureaucracy with the staff of Infocom, a lesser game with some brilliant ideas in it. Later he wrote Starship Titanic for a different company, which was fairly well-received. Douglas Adams was, as said, a brilliant person, but his was a whimsical and capricious intelligence, fixating on things that seized its fancy, but that made it difficult to focus on mundanities.
Infocom’s games sold steadily fewer copies as time passed. Eventually, they were bought by Activision, and functionally shut down. They made some Zork games themselves, but eventually Activision forgot that Zork or Infocom even existed.
Some more time passed….
Douglas Adams wrote some more Hitchhiker’s books. At the time there were already two, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Life, The Universe and Everything. He soon followed it up with So Long And Thanks For All the Fish, and then Mostly Harmless.
He never did write that sequel to the computer Hitchhiker’s game. Then, sadly, Douglas Adams, who in Last Chance to See wrote movingly about animals on the edge of extinction, went extinct himself, dying on May 11, 2001.
Time continued to pass. Disney, the least-suited company for such a thing, made a big movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It wasn’t too bad, all told, but it wasn’t Disney-level popular, probably because it didn’t have space magicians or superheroes in it.
Lots of people, not the least of which his old friends at Infocom, were saddened that Adams never followed up with that second Guide game.
Then in 2023, a person with the nom de net of Max Fox wrote their own version of what a sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy might have been. It’s called Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
It adheres to older trends in adventure gaming: you die sometimes just from trying things out. Puzzle solutions can be a bit cryptic. But it also has a simulation of Infocom’s “Invisiclues” built in, where you can pick the area you’re in and problem you’re having from lists and get a series of more specific hints for getting past your problem area, which is still a pretty good way to provide play help without giving away the whole puzzle like a walkthrough might.
No, it isn’t the sequel that Douglas Adams would have written. But that thing will never be. It’s possible that someday a different sequel will be written that matches Douglas Adams’s voice a little better. But in the meantime, we have one idea of what it could have been like.
It doesn’t make it a happier galaxy to live in. But it does make it marginally less sad, and that’s the best we can hope for.
(Note: following images have spoilers for the very early phase of the game. If you want to play this game, you’ll need a program that can play Z-machine files. I suggest Windows Frotz.)
The beginning, after the endingAn unsettling landscapeFive points, and a sudden demise
Infocom text adventures in the classic style have this interesting thing they do where you explore interesting locations and solve puzzles in the rooms, but there’s also some miscellaneous things you have to do to keep yourself alive. Resource management.
Later Infocom games tended to go much easier on this kind of puzzle, but they were, then and now, a source of frustration to players, and that kind of difficulty termed friction by some, isn’t currently in fashion and can be excluding to new players.
Zork I in particular had two such elements: the need to keep a light source going in the underground at all times or else stumble around in the dark and soon get eaten by grues, and its carrying limit, which forced players to ascend to the White House frequently to deposit their treasures in the Trophy Case.
Similarly Planetfall, that game what has Floyd the robot in it, requires your character keep themself fed to stay alive, which is something of a distraction from the game’s mysteries. It also removes some ways the player can block themselves from winning, and removes some of the ways to die, in the name of fairness.
There are a couple of Github projects that took the publicly-released source code and removed these portions of the game. All of the rooms are still there, but the lamp has so much energy that it probably won’t run out, the player can carry much more and won’t fumble with the items they’re carrying unless they carry a huge amount, probably more items than there is in the game.
Just to let you know, I’m not yet aware of any such project to make the Babel Fish puzzle in the game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy less infuriating.
Here’s the kind of minor-yet-cool thing that I love to see, a crossstitch project based off of the first room of Zork, but with a little extra when viewed at night!
The Digital Antiquarian‘s website contains a wealth of information, but rather than let my works get too gummed up in describing it all right now, here’s is one page from 2012, on the creation of ZIL, the Zork Implementation Language, and the virtual machine that runs it, the Z-Machine.
When we left off last time, Marc Blank and Joel Berez were considering how to bring Zork to the microcomputer. Really, they were trying to solve three interrelated problems. At the risk of being pedantic, let me lay out them for you:
1. How to get Zork, a massive game that consumed 1 MB of memory on the PDP-10, onto their chosen minimum microcomputer system, an Apple II or TRS-80 with 32 K of RAM and a single floppy-disk drive.
2. How to do so in a portable way that would make it as painless as possible to move Zork not only to the Apple II and TRS-80 but also, if all went well, to many more current and future mutually incompatible platforms.
3. How to use the existing MDL source code to Zork as the basis for the new microcomputer version, rather than having to start all over again and implement the game from scratch in some new environment.
