For whatever reason, I never played a game that has become almost legendary in the computer world. The game I’m referring to?
Zork.
It’s mentioned in all sorts of places, like UserFriendly, Mark’s account of a Windows XP installation (see #56), and even in Eric Raymond’s jargon dictionary. In spite of its pervasiveness, I had never played it until a few days ago.
I was able to play thanks to a site about Infocom, a selection of game files and ap2inf to convert them. I not only played Zork, but Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and since I have read the book now, it made a lot more sense.
Anyway, now that I’ve played Zork, I have learned firsthand the deathly ill that is a Grue in the dark. It was fun to experience what are fond memories of others, for the first time.
grues. babblefish. sweet memories… (of wasting a LOT of time)
Umm, I don’t see how to actually run the file. I catted the dsk files to one file and ap2inf’d it and tried other stuff too, but it won’t give me a good binary.
I’m finally going to read it. I got it from someone at a Bookcrossing Meetup last week. My husband is reading it this week (it’s been awhile for him) and when I get back in town, I’m going to tackle it.
You don’t actually run the file, you run jzip on the file that ap2inf produced. I’ll e-mail you what I used.
Oh my yes, I spent many hours playing text adventure games. If you liked those, visit IFarchive.org for lots more. I once tried to write my own IF using ALAN; learning the programming language was easy – it was coming up with a good story I had trouble with!