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CHAPTER 2. Scholars of the adventure genre in American novels

1. The father of the adventure genre

Zork has been described as "by far the most famous piece of [interactive fiction]" and "the father figure of the genre". Game historian Matt Barton contended that "to say that Zork is an influential adventure game is like saying the Iliad is an influential poem". Rather than simply influencing games, Barton said it instead showed that the computer could simulate a rich virtual world, and helped lay the foundations of video game concepts around exploring, collecting objects, and overcoming problems. Nick Montfort, in his book on interactive fiction Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (2003), Zork'. Janet Murray, in Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), considered this a result of the way the game was programmed compared to other games of the time, with each area, item, and actor modeled as their own object that could act and be acted upon. Historians have argued that Zork Colossal Cave Adventure, influenced the creation of the MUD genre, and through it the more recent massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre.
''s natural language parser has been noted as having a strong personality, and one of the first games to have one. It has been cited as starting a strong trend in writing for adventure games having "metafictional humor, and tendency towards self- parody". Decades later Zork is still cited as an inspiration for text interfaces such as chatbots. It has also been used, along with other text adventure games, as a framework for testing natural language processing systems.
Zork was listed on several lists of the best video games more than a decade after release. In 1992 Computer Gaming World Zork to its Hall of Fame. It was placed on "best games of all time" lists for Computer Gaming World and Next Generation in 1996, and Next Generation listed the entire series as a whole in 1999 ³. In 2016 PC Gamer ranked Zork as one of the fifty most important video games ever made for



³ Galley, Stu (Summer 1985). "The History of Zork—Third in a series". The New Zork Times..
establishing Infocom as a studio and defining an entire generation of adventure games. In 2007 Zork was listed among the ten "game canon " Library of Congress.
Zork was the centerpiece of Infocom's game catalog, and Infocom quickly followed it with several more text adventure games using variants of the Zork codebase and the Z-machine, each of which sold tens of thousands of copies. By 1984, three years after Infocom began self-publishing Zork I, Infocom had fifty full-time employees, US$6 million in annual sales, and twelve other games released. Infocom internally nicknamed its early games in relation to Zork, such as "Zork: the Mystery" (Deadline, 1982), "Zorks in Space" (Starcross, 1982), and Zork IV (Enchanter, 1983). By 1986 this had increased to 26 total titles. Although Wishbringer: The Magick Stone of Dreams (1985) was ostensibly set in the same world as Zork, the company had not made any more official Zork games, releasing only a Zork Trilogy compilation of all three episodes.
In 1985 Infocom diversified into professional software by creating a relational database product called Cornerstone. Poor sales led to financial difficulties and the company was sold to Activision in 1986. Infocom then created two more Zork games: Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor (1987), which added a graphical map and more role-playing and combat elements, and Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz (1988), a prequel game that added graphical elements and menus as well as graphical minigames. Infocom's tenure under Activision was rocky, and rising costs and falling profits, exacerbated by a lack of new products in 1988, led Activision to close Infocom in 1989⁴.
Activision returned to the series with several graphic adventure games: Return to Zork (1993), Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands (1996), and Zork: Grand Inquisitor (1997). It also released Zork: The Undiscovered Underground (1997), a free text adventure game partially written by original Infocom implementers Michael Berlyn and Marc Blank to promote Zork: Grand Inquisitor. In 2009 Jolt
Online Gaming released Legends of Zork, a freemium browser-based online adventure game.
The original Zork games have been re-released in several compilations since Zork Trilogy. They are included in The Lost Treasures of Infocom (1991), Zork Anthology (1994), Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom (1996), and Zork Legacy Collection (1996). A graphical port of Zork I PlayStation and Sega Saturn consoles was developed by Arc System Works and published by Shōeisha in Japan in 1996, nineteen years after its original release. Zork have been created for over forty years for a wide range of systems, such as browsers or smart speakers.
Four gamebooks, written by Infocom developer Steve Meretzky and set in the Zork world, were published in 1983–1984: The Forces of Krill (1983), The Malifestro Quest (1983), The Cavern of Doom (1983), and Conquest at Quendor (1984). These books, known collectively as the "Zork books", are presented as interactive fiction in the style of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, wherein the player makes periodic choices and turns to a page that corresponds to that choice. Two novels were published based on the original game: The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger (1990) and The Lost City of Zork Robin Wayne Bailey (1991). In 1996 Threshold Entertainment acquired the rights to Zork and announced plans to create a Zork movie and live action TV series, though it was never produced<sup>5





5</sup> "Zorkning yaratilishi". Retro Gamer. No. 77. May 2010. 36-39 betlar.

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