Relive Your Geek Past: Play Zork Online
One of the great things about being my age (which I will not say, but should not be hard to guess), is that many of the things I got teased about when I was geeky kid are cool now that I am a geeky adult. TV shows like Psych and Chuck make their money by appealing to lifelong geeks like me. Geeks are so cool now, you’d think everyone in my generation grew up reading Tolkien, programming TRS-80s, and playing Dungeons and Dragons. But I know better. There weren’t many of us back then, at least in the heart of Montana where I lived.
One of those geeky things I loved to do was play Zork, a text-based computer game by Infocom. My friends and I would play Zork on my Apple IIe and try to conquer the underground kingdom while avoiding being eaten by the Grue. Ah, the hours we wasted getting lost in an imaginary world created solely by green text on a black background.
Image from blog.arsanth.com
If you weren’t a geek back then but want to be able to pretend like you were, your chance has come–Zork is available to play online for free. Click this link, and begin your journey. If you’ve never played a text-based game before, you might enjoy it, especially in today’s over-stimulated environment. It’s best if you just start playing without any help; however, you might want to check out this list of Zork commands if you get stuck. That’s really all you need to get going. But to really enter into the true Zork experience, here are a few suggestions:
- Put on a baseball shirt with a catchy movie phrase on the front like, “Be Excellent to Each Other.”
- Listen to an album by a group like Yes, Rush, Kansas, The Alan Parsons Project, Camel, or Rick Wakeman.
- Turn off all the lights except for your novelty plasma globe.
- Try not to get eaten by a Grue.
