Your score in the end game is 100 [total of 100 points], in 52 moves. This score gives you the rank of Dungeon Master. Spoilers ahoy. Notable things about the endgame: The scoring trick. I never did quite make it to 616 out of 616 points, but I’m not worried in that a.) knowing how [...]

Things are winding down. I’ve found all the treasures and am trying to solve the endgame, so hopefully my next post will have “Won!” or some permutation thereof. In the meantime, three puzzles are thoroughly spoiled below. The Bank of Zork This is my nominee for worst puzzle in the game. There’s a Safety Depository [...]

[Source.] It’s time for a progress report, also known as a random selection of observations that don’t sort well as a single post: * I found an ivory torch which seems to have unlimited fuel; I tested many, many WAIT commands and the torch kept going. Strangely, I also ran across a point in experimenting [...]

When people talk about brute forcing on an adventure, they usually mean trying every inventory object on every puzzle. Really though, there are four methods of brute force: 1. Map-checking 2. Item-checking 3. Puzzle-checking 4. Verb-checking #1 for instance could be trying every feasible action in each room, checking them off as you go. #3 [...]

For a game with large landscape, many puzzles, and a harsh inventory limit, it’s essential to have a base of operations: a place to stash everything. One of my stopping points in Zork is that it’s been hard to find one due to the thief (who will keep treasures, and take non-treasures and drop them [...]

I’ve tried my third port of Zork (although I am sticking with the second for now), so I wanted to talk more about the versions that are out there. To recap an earlier post, the mainframe version of Zork started in 1977 a language called MDL, was ported in early 1978 to FORTRAN and renamed [...]

(Heavy spoilers ahead.) Last time I posted about my system for handling being stuck. I’ve become less stuck; here’s how my breakthrough went down. First there was a puzzle I already remembered from Zork II: Riddle Room This is a room which is bare on all sides. There is an exit down. To the east [...]

(Heavier spoilers than usual this post.) First, a mea culpa: you do get a faint blue glow when the thief is nearby, but only in the original Muddle version and not in the ZDungeon port. It’s actually even more effective than the sword suddenly turning on: it happens more frequently, and it makes for more [...]

I didn’t discuss Adventure‘s overall plot at all; there’s a true sense that there isn’t one. The entire task was of collecting treasures and storing them, and the “endgame” was tacked on in the same manner as a late-80s arcade game. That’s not to say there wasn’t a story — see for example my experiences [...]

Just to clarify a bit of history: the mainframe Zork I am playing was too large a game for personal computers at the time, so when it went commercial it got split into Zork I, II, and III. Since I have only played the commercial versions playing mainframe Zork is like a fuzzy mash-up of [...]