121 - Zork: The Great Underground Empire
Platform(s): PC
Designer(s): Marc Blank and David Lebling
Developer: Infocom
Publisher: Infocom
"Many consider the text-only adventure game Zork to be the granddaddy of adventure gaming. Sure, technically, Adventure was the first ever text adventure game; but it had crude puzzles, terse descriptions, and was nearly impossible to beat. Zork, on the other hand, delighted generations with rich prose descriptions of fantastic environments and awesome puzzles. Originally born on a mainframe in the 70s, Zork was too big to fit on a personal computer so it was broken into a trilogy for its release on home systems. Its success spurred a whole genre, and its creators went on to develop some of the best adventure games of all time (Suspended, Enchanter, Deadline, PlanetFall, and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy to name a few). As a game genre, text-only adventures are commercially dead, killed by whiz-bang graphics and GUI, fueled today only by nogistalgic fans around the Internet. But for many of us, Zork left a permanent impression -- and set a high water mark that even today's graphical games have difficulty reaching. We tasted true adventure on our PCs, and were spoiled forever. " - GameSpy
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