External Links


zdungeon.z5
ported to Inform by Ethan Dicks
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
dungn32b.zip *
Contains dtext
MS-DOS Application
dungn25a.zip *
Contains DTEXT.DAT
Requires an AdvSys interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
dungn22a.zip *
MS-DOS Application
dungn27a.zip *
MS-DOS Application
dungeon​_winglk.zip *
requires Glk.​dll
Windows Application
dungeon​_dosglk.zip *
MS-DOS Application
zorkvms.zip *
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
Dungeon-Glk.sit.hqx
Mac OS Application (Compressed with StuffIt, encoded in BinHex format. Free StuffIt Expanders are available for most systems at www.stuffit.com.)
dungeon.spk
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
dungn26b.zip *
Contains dtext.dat
Requires an AdvSys interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
tads​_dungeon.zip *
game file and source code
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
Dungeon.lha
Amiga Application (Compressed with LHA (also known as LHArc). Free unpacking tools are available for most platforms.)
zork-27m.hqx
Mac OS Application (Encoded in Macintosh Bin/Hex format.)
dungeon.zoo
Atari ST Application
Dungeon.lzh
Amiga Application
dungeon-2.5.6.tar.gz
(Compressed with the Unix-style .tar.gz "tarball" format. Free unpacking tools are available for most platforms.)
Dungeon.zip *
maps in GUEmap format
dungeon-glk.tar.Z
uses GLK library
dungeon-3.2B.unidiff
patch to 3.​2A source code, for Larry Wall's
dung-map.zip *
map in Postscript format
dungeon-3.2B.patch
patch to 3.​2A source code
dungeon.ps
map in Postscript format
dungeon.sol
solution to version 3.​1
Dungeon​_source.sit
in MacBinary format
(Compressed with StuffIt. Free StuffIt Expanders are available for most systems at www.stuffit.com.)
* Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.
Compressed with the Unix-style .tar.Z "tarball" format. Free unpacking tools are available for most platforms.

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Zork

by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling

Cave crawl, Zorkian
1979

(based on 30 ratings)
5 reviews

About the Story

Also known as Dungeon. The original mainframe game that was later split and adapted into the Zork trilogy for microcomputers.


Game Details

Language: English (en)
Current Version: Release 13
License: Freeware
Development System: C
Baf's Guide ID: 2
IFIDs:  ZCODE-12-990623-CBCB
ZCODE-0-WT----
ZCODE-0-MOED--
ZCODE-21862----567
ZCODE-13-040826-575A
TUID: 4gxk83ja4twckm6j

Makes reference to Adventure, by William Crowther and Donald Woods

Adaptations:
The Royal Puzzle, by Port by Kenneth Pedersen, original by Bruce Daniels et al.
Zork 285, by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling
Zork I, by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling
Zork II, by Dave Lebling, Marc Blank
Zork III, by Dave Lebling, Marc Blank
Ported to ZIL in Zork 285, by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling
Remade as Zork 285, by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling
Referenced in:
A Bear's Night Out, by David Dyte
Ferret, by FerretAuthors@jugglingsoot.com
Give Me Your Lunch Money, by DCBSupafly
Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort, by Tiberius Thingamus

Editorial Reviews

Baf's Guide


This is the forbear of the Zork trilogy, written at MIT before Infocom was formed. The first game to feature a full-sentence parser, albeit a crude one by today's standards. Very derivative of Adventure, from the maze of twisty little passages to the orange smoke that accompanies ressurrection. Basically, a treasure hunt in a cave. Two mazes (counting the coal mine), a little randomized combat, and a nonsense puzzle or two. Much historical interest, however. Nearly everything in this game can be found in the Zork trilogy, although some crucial details are different. Available in various stages of its development; unlike Adventure, which used a very rigid database, this game was designed to be easy to modify, and got modified a lot.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

IF-Review
Archaeology
The move away from antagonistic IF is the reason why things like mazes, limited light sources, and starvation puzzles are met with a chorus of jeers these days, but the elimination of these elements doesn't necessarily dictate anything in particular about how literary or puzzleless a game might be. Instead, the change makes the whole experience of IF more about fun than bloody-minded perseverance; playing Dungeon makes it clear how necessary this change was, and how far we've come since those mainframe days.
See the full review

Play This Thing!
Every gamer should play these games--once at least. For historical reasons--but also to understand what has been lost by the focus on improved graphics at the expense of excellent writing.
See the full review

50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed
If Adventure had introduced hackers to an intriguing new genre of immersive text game, Zork was what brought it to the public at large. In the early 1980s, as the personal computer revolution reached into more and more homes, a Zork disk was a must-buy for first-time computer owners. By 1982 it had become the industry’s bestselling game.
[...]
[...] The thief, along with the rest of Zork, evolved in a way that few previous text games had: through continuous interaction with an active player base. [...] Much like devs in the 2010s livestreaming game development on Twitch, distant spectators could watch Zork’s creators test and play their game in real-time, as they were making it. It wasn’t long before the spectators figured out how to launch the unfinished game themselves and begin their own expeditions into the Great Underground Empire.
[...]
Zork is more remembered today for its pride of place than its actual gameplay. Scholar Nick Montfort praises its innovations, but calls it “a very early and rough effort” that’s “not a masterwork by today’s standards.” A 21st-century reviewer notes that it “wants nothing more than to see you fail, and it’s not overly concerned with how much fun you might be having.”
[...]
Zork is noteworthy for more than just its commercial success. When the Library of Congress decided in 2007 to start archiving games with cultural significance, it was one of the first ten selected. Influencing the aesthetics of games for a generation, leaving behind tropes like grues and brass lanterns, it would also provide an enduring technical foundation for future text game creators.
See the full review

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Member Reviews

5 star:
(11)
4 star:
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3 star:
(5)
2 star:
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1 star:
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Number of Reviews: 5
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Most Helpful Member Reviews


5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
HUGE Game, Memorable, important in IF history, March 20, 2015
by GameStomper (Vancouver, WA)
Related reviews: zork, infocom, dungeon, 1977, history, huge, treasure hunt, underground, fantasy, maze

ZORK (this mainframe version) is a huge game. I spent maybe five hours just working on the game and making maps before I started to feel stuck. I finally gave in and starting using some hint files (life's too short to not use hint files). It is frustrating to find that you had the right idea - just not the right verb/noun. For example I tried to "eat Eat-Me cake" and apparently my version wanted "eat eatme cake". Yeah, those are the kinds of things that you're glad you used a hint file for!

I spent about 2-3 weeks working my way through the game and putting together a solution & hint file guide. When I was finally finished, I really felt a sense of accomplishment! Not only was there 616 treasure-hunting points to earn, but also an additional 100 point end game. It really is a wonder of its time... and even more interesting knowing that only a small minority of people had access or knowledge about this behemoth growing to the limits of its maximum 1MB file size.

While the individual ZORK games underwent further refinement, and indeed became better games in focus, fun and functionality... it was a real treat to go back to the origins of ZORK. Like many others, ZORK was my introduction to Interactive-Fiction... so it was a heady mix of nostalgia and new discovery. All the major players are here - the Troll, the Thief, the Rainbow Bridge, the Flood Control Dam, etc. It's just bigger and longer than you remember (especially since your memory is likely ZORK I).

It's definitely worth playing, and even more fun if you haven't revisited the old treadworn land of Zork in some time. But from an IF history perspective, this was a milestone in the making. Zork became the killer-app for a number of early computers... and Infocom went on to produce some of the greatest works ever in this genre.
- And it all started here.

BTW, I think the best version is the inform port. It has the most flexibility in the words you can use, with a few added responses and synonyms that are not available in WinGlux and others.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A hard game that gets more fun the further you get, July 1, 2015
by MathBrush
Related reviews: more than 10 hours

Zork is the most famous adventure game, although it was not the first. This version contains much of the three Infocom Zork games which were developed later.

Zork is a large puzzle-heavy exploration game. It has inventory limits, a timer of sorts (the light in your lamp), and it has several unfair puzzles (depending on the version you play, some important in-game clues can be omitted). The exits in the rooms work in a non-symmetric way, so going north and then south might bring you back to the wrong place.

I found that mapping out the entire game myself was very helpful. Instead of drawing a map, I just made a numbered list in the notes section of Frotz of all the rooms and their exits. That alone let me get much farther than I did 5 years ago.

I used walkthroughs after getting about half of the points, but the version on IFDB contained a fatal bug preventing me from completing the endgame. I found another version online that ran slower but which allowed me to complete the ending.

The game gets better the further you get. The 'hidden' areas are really fun, and I was surprised how huge this game really is. It makes sense that it was split into 5 games later.

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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Zork +1, April 5, 2010
by tggdan3 (Michigan)

What can I say? One of my first IFs was Zork I. It wasn't until much later that I found this Dungeon game, and realized that it was a super expanded version of Zork I, like they took all the best parts of Zork I-III and squished them together.

The first thing Zork fans will notice is that the mazes are all mixed up. In fact, were this not floating by on the popularity of Zork, I would give it a much lower review. Directions do not lead in directions that make sense: going south does not lead you to the room you just went north from all the time. In fact, you can go to the North of the house, and keep going north until you (apparantly) go around the world and bump into the south of the house again. Now, presumably the paths are twisting or something, but you really need some kind of reasonable mapping structure.

All the best puzzles are here, and if you played Zork I-III you will know all the answers, because there is nothing new here (except maybe a few puzzles from sorcerer that never made it into Zork I, alas!).

I played the inform translation, and there are some simple irritating errors- the boat doesn't move downstream on its own (you must move DOWN to go downstream...), some of the alternate puzzle solutions aren't presnet (the loud room is an example), and since all the rooms are in different places than you're used to, it can get frustrating.

However, those complaints only matter if you're fluent in Zork I-III. If not, this game is all fresh and new, and none of these complaints matter. What you WILL be concerned with is the light puzzle with a light source that only lasts so long, a npc who randomly comes into rooms and steals or moves things, a carrying capacity limit, a glacier puzzle which I contend does not have a realistic solution, and a trivia questionare at the end that forces you to have found all the little secret things (even ones that you would need out-of-world or hints to even know about) to finish the game.

That being said, this was the first big game since Collossal Cave Adventure, and it was the blueprint for every other game since. It is very small by today's standards, but it was broken up into 3 games originally because it was too big to be contianed on the 5.25" floppies they used to have back in the day.

Don't expect any real story- you're dropped in the world with no explanation to go stealing everything you can. Don't expect to even know what your goal is (though it's putting valuables in a trophy case). And don't expect NPCs to be friendly or even non-hostile (even though sometimes you have to rely on them). Certainly dated in every sense by today's standard- just like Lord of the Rings is dated by Fantasy Literary standards, but it started the genre, and should be played if just to experience the rich history that created Infocom and IF in the first place.

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Zork on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Zork appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Favorite Fours From Industrious Implementors, 1G by Walter Sandsquish
Some IF writers write more than others. Here are my favorite four games from authors who've released at least half-a-dozen games to date. This list covers 1st-generation text-adventure implementors, who published the bulk of their work...

Must-Play IF by gettera
There are some games I think everyone should play--as I play through them, I'll add the best games here.

Must try by Kku2611
I am new to IF and collect all of the recommended games under a list for future consulting.

See all lists mentioning this game

Polls

The following polls include votes for Zork:

I'm looking for Easter Eggs.. by morganthegirl
I'm somewhat new to IF and was wondering if Easter Eggs are ever hidden in these games as they are in others? If so, which games have them? If there a lot of them, then which ones are the "best"?

Games with great puzzles by Molly
Games that have great puzzle-design. The puzzles need to be logical and internally consistent.

Best classic zork adventure by Aintelligence
What is the best classic zork adventure which includes all zork including classics and subdivisions.

See all polls with votes for this game




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