I wish that I could tell you that Zork is anywhere near the gigantic leap in the history of computer games that much of the world seems to think it is, but I've played Colossal Cave, or Adventure, or Colossal Cave Adventure, or The-Game-That-Did-Most-Of-This-Immediately-Before-Zork. That said, I should admit that prior to now, I'd been selling Zork short. It definitely IS meaningfully different from its predecessor and stands in its own right as one of gaming's critical progenitors.
Zork, unlike Colossal Cave, is not limited to a two or three word text parser and doesn't reduce most item-based verbs down to the word "use." You can even ask it questions, such as "What is a grue?" This is, in my somewhat controversial opinion, both positive and negative. Colossal Cave's limitations force a certain simplicity onto the player's interactions with the world. The player can intuit pretty quickly what sorts of things they can do, and how those commands must be formatted. Zork introduces more complexity, which in my previously more pessimistic read translated to more confusion and a greater tendency toward misinterpretation. The English language is a hot, filthy mess, and given the choice between an ultra-primitive computer program attempting to wrangle that mess in all its complexity like Zork does, and a slightly more primitive program constructing its own clearer, more simplistic language, I, as a 21st century player, am actually inclined to choose the latter.
Having finished Zork 1, I mostly stand by this preference, but I have found the appeal in Zork's more advanced parsing. While it may be more frustrating or overwhelming at times, there's something to be said for the mystery provided by that wider possibility space. The options on any given "screen" of Zork are less apparent, and that can lead to greater creativity on the part of the player. It's exciting to come up with a course of action that would be outside the capabilities of Colossal Cave and see it play out. It's also all the more likely that you'll encounter some generic error text, because the more flexibility you introduce here, the more ridiculous edge cases you burden the author with responding to. If an input produces nothing, it provokes disappointment. If the author tries to respond to every single potential input, it exhausts sanity. In other regards, however, it's an important quality of life improvement. In Zork you don't have to type "get sack" and THEN "get bottle", you can type a single line: "get sack and bottle." More importantly, upon closer inspection I've found that Zork 1 never ACTUALLY demands much complexity of the player at all... it's more just the threat of it that had me digging in my heels. Zork's difficulty has much more to do with its sense of humor and its classic moon logic than anything else, though a more limited option set certainly does help one feel their way out of such things more easily. Colossal Cave has a giant snake that must somehow be defeated by a tiny bird, but with so few verbs and such a limited inventory at that point in the game, trial and error WILL eventually save the day.
In many ways, Zork, or at least Zork 1, still definitely feels to me like a clone of a more inspired game. At the same time, having spent more hours with it, I do think that there is value in Zork's audacious tampering. It develops its tools in an interesting direction, layers on some more interesting prose, and creates something more playful than its inspiration. Zork's parser is genuinely impressive from an early programming perspective, breaking down sentences in an effective and intuitive way. Besides, it's hard to take Zork too harshly to task for basically flat-out plagiarizing Colossal Cave when that still requires replacing all of the puzzles it's made of. I feel it's also worth noting that in 1977, Zork was already more than Zork 1. The original mainframe version of the game basically contained all of Zork 1 AND almost all of Zork 2 before it was organized into a trilogy of smaller games for sale. That Zork 2 content helps a LOT in the originality department, and with this impressive quantity of puzzling setpieces, I find it hard not to toss Zork a few more mental points... especially considering there was so little else going on in the nascent world of gaming in 1977. The fact of the matter is, Zork is still a more enjoyable experience than any other piece of software produced in its year, with unique strengths that hold up fairly well even to this day.
Zork, unlike Colossal Cave, is not limited to a two or three word text parser and doesn't reduce most item-based verbs down to the word "use." You can even ask it questions, such as "What is a grue?" This is, in my somewhat controversial opinion, both positive and negative. Colossal Cave's limitations force a certain simplicity onto the player's interactions with the world. The player can intuit pretty quickly what sorts of things they can do, and how those commands must be formatted. Zork introduces more complexity, which in my previously more pessimistic read translated to more confusion and a greater tendency toward misinterpretation. The English language is a hot, filthy mess, and given the choice between an ultra-primitive computer program attempting to wrangle that mess in all its complexity like Zork does, and a slightly more primitive program constructing its own clearer, more simplistic language, I, as a 21st century player, am actually inclined to choose the latter.
Having finished Zork 1, I mostly stand by this preference, but I have found the appeal in Zork's more advanced parsing. While it may be more frustrating or overwhelming at times, there's something to be said for the mystery provided by that wider possibility space. The options on any given "screen" of Zork are less apparent, and that can lead to greater creativity on the part of the player. It's exciting to come up with a course of action that would be outside the capabilities of Colossal Cave and see it play out. It's also all the more likely that you'll encounter some generic error text, because the more flexibility you introduce here, the more ridiculous edge cases you burden the author with responding to. If an input produces nothing, it provokes disappointment. If the author tries to respond to every single potential input, it exhausts sanity. In other regards, however, it's an important quality of life improvement. In Zork you don't have to type "get sack" and THEN "get bottle", you can type a single line: "get sack and bottle." More importantly, upon closer inspection I've found that Zork 1 never ACTUALLY demands much complexity of the player at all... it's more just the threat of it that had me digging in my heels. Zork's difficulty has much more to do with its sense of humor and its classic moon logic than anything else, though a more limited option set certainly does help one feel their way out of such things more easily. Colossal Cave has a giant snake that must somehow be defeated by a tiny bird, but with so few verbs and such a limited inventory at that point in the game, trial and error WILL eventually save the day.
In many ways, Zork, or at least Zork 1, still definitely feels to me like a clone of a more inspired game. At the same time, having spent more hours with it, I do think that there is value in Zork's audacious tampering. It develops its tools in an interesting direction, layers on some more interesting prose, and creates something more playful than its inspiration. Zork's parser is genuinely impressive from an early programming perspective, breaking down sentences in an effective and intuitive way. Besides, it's hard to take Zork too harshly to task for basically flat-out plagiarizing Colossal Cave when that still requires replacing all of the puzzles it's made of. I feel it's also worth noting that in 1977, Zork was already more than Zork 1. The original mainframe version of the game basically contained all of Zork 1 AND almost all of Zork 2 before it was organized into a trilogy of smaller games for sale. That Zork 2 content helps a LOT in the originality department, and with this impressive quantity of puzzling setpieces, I find it hard not to toss Zork a few more mental points... especially considering there was so little else going on in the nascent world of gaming in 1977. The fact of the matter is, Zork is still a more enjoyable experience than any other piece of software produced in its year, with unique strengths that hold up fairly well even to this day.