Having been caught by the red herring that is Hello Sailor (until I finally asked one wiser than I where it was useful), I was delighted to see that you could use it in Zork 3. It’s not necessary to solving the game — you get an invisibility potion, but there’s an alternative solution to whatever puzzle it solves (sorry to be so vague, but it’s been a very long time).

It’s so cool that these games are still of interest (if only to dedicated researchers), and to see how lively the IF community is now!

Sweden didn’t have anything like Infocom or Level 9 to establish any kind of industry standard as to which words were recognized etc. I think Stugan may have been the only commercial IF game in Swedish, published by a “real” software publisher, There were a bunch of hobbyist games as well, and some of them tried to sell their games through cheap ads in magazines, but I doubt anyone made much money that way. Anyway, this means everyone pretty much made their own translation of the words used in the vocabulary of their favourite games in English, resulting in quite a bit of variation from game to game.

There are many puzzles in IF games where you need to figure out how some other entity in the game works, in order to win over it., whether it be a thief, a carousel room or something else. Back in 1977, I think it may have seemed just as valid to let the parser be one of those entities. Actually, you having to overcome the parser was an intentional puzzle in some later games as well, like Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

You say the Muppet sequence was your favourite in Stuga, and I can see why. Unfortunately, 99% of all the people who have played the game, have only played the commercial version “Stugan”. It’s a shame because the publisher, who asked the authors to port the game to MS-DOS, didn’t dare to have the Muppets in the game, for legal reasons, so this portion of the game was removed completely. Almost all of the other stuff was kept, and a few things were added. Also, some more ASCII art and PC speaker music was added. The publisher also had the “Stugan” version of the game translated to English, with the title “The Cottage”, but I haven’t been able to find a copy.

I have played Stuga to a successful ending, but that did require quite a bit of source code reading. After that, I wrote the hints. I seriously doubt that anyone ever completed the game without any kind of hints or access to the source code. There are just so many far-fetched solutions to puzzles, and even randomness, so that doing the right thing will still only give you a 30% chance of success.

If you want to “play” it, get a list of what order you should visit the time periods. Go by that.