Some users of this forum are really young, so I thought I could point out a game from around 35 years ago, with a little help from wikipedia.

The original version of Zork I was published by Personal Software in 1980 for the TRS-08 and was simply called Zork, but Infocom later handled the distribution of that game and their subsequent games. The Personal Software version was distributed in clear plastic bags containing only the game disk and a 36-page booklet.

The game takes place in the Zork calendar year 948 GUE (although the passage of time is not notable in gameplay). The player steps into the deliberately vague role of an "adventurer". The game begins near a white house in a small, self-contained area. Although the player is given little instruction, the house provides an obvious point of interest.
When the player enters the house, it yields a number of intriguing objects, including an ancient brass lantern, an empty trophy case and an intricately engraved sword. Beneath the rug a trap door leads down into a dark cellar, which is revealed to be one of several entrances to a vast subterranean land known as the Great Underground Empire. The player soon encounters dangerous creatures, including deadly grues, an axe-wielding troll, a giant cyclops and a nimble-fingered thief who makes mapping the maze difficult by removing any items that the player might drop to leave a trail.
The ultimate goal of Zorh I is to collect the Twenty Treasures of Zork and install them in the trophy case. Finding the treasures requires solving a variety of puzzles such as the navigation of two complex mazes and some intricate manipulations at Flood Control Dam #3.

In late 1977 a hacker obtained a copy of the Zork source code, which was subsequently spread.

Zork I was the best-selling game of 1982, with 32,000 copies sold by the first half of that year. Its sales surprised Infocom by rising, not falling, over time; many dealers sold the game as an essential accessory to those purchasing new computers. The company sold almost 100,000 copies in 1983, more than 150,000 copies in 1984, comprising more than 20% of Infocom's sales that year, and a total of 378,987 copies by 1986.

BYTE declared in 1981 that "No single advance in the science of Adventure has been as bold and exciting" as Zork. The magazine praised the sophisticated parser and quality of writing, stating, "That the program is entertaining, eloquent, witty, and precisely written is almost beside the point ... Zork can be felt and touched—experienced, if you will—through the care and attention to detail the authors have rendered." It concluded, "Somebody, please, let me know when [the sequel is] done."

It was available on these platforms: PDP-10, Atari 8-bit family, Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, Commodore 128, CP/M, TRS-80, IBM PC, Apple II, Apple IIe, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, DOS, TRS-80, NEC PC-9801, MSX, PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A.

How was a text adventure as Zork? transcript and walkthrough

Hope you liked some retro memories... and easter egg :)
The classics should be always known. Did you ever play one of these adventures of old?

9 years ago*

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Do you like classic games?

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Yes
No
If it's not on steam, I'm a potato

I couldn't get into text-based video games. I was too young to have that kind of patience, let alone reading ability. In 1982, I was only 2.

9 years ago
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When I was I think 7-8 years old I really loved one book-game,you meet events,choose actions and go to the page number X and further with a dices based combat

9 years ago
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I had some of them too, with Dragonlance theme. I loved that stuff those days!

9 years ago
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same, I enjoyed some book-games with a horror theme... very cool

9 years ago
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I used to LOVE Pick-a-Path and Choose Your Own Adventure books! Sadly, I'm sure I read somewhere that one of the guys credited with creating CYOA and popularising the genre died last year :(

9 years ago
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I played some text adventures on C64, like Gremlins for example, but never stumbled upon Zork.
I didn't know English then really, we just sat there with my brother for hours typing left. right. left. Pardon, was it North/South/East/West?
We had so much fun. How was that even possible?!

Oh, and...
Did you by any chance play The Detective Game?
Those games.
Those times!

9 years ago*
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nop, i don't remember it :o

9 years ago
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Much detective. Very noir. :3

9 years ago
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Soon enough here nobody will know or care what Zork is. : (

9 years ago
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Bump for the maze!

9 years ago
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Bite lip!

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Text adventures are still being made today, the absolute majority of them is fan-made, and some are really fantastic. Photopia, So Far, Spider and Web, Anchorhead are just a few examples of brilliant writing coupled with great gameplay (yes, there's gameplay in text adventures, too ^_^).

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9 years ago
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Oh dear, thanks for the heads up! Upvoted.

9 years ago
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I had Zork on the C64.

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Zork sounds like something Scientologists get off to.

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Didn't a Call of Duty have an easter egg of the full original and playable Zork in it? Should have given a few of the younger generation a taste! I never had it until years after, think I had Zork Grand Inquisitor on the PC. I owned loads of Amiga games so it's possible I owned it on there.

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I am old enough to recognise your avatar ;)
Zork was a real milestone in gaming, and if you think about it the Z-Machine virtual machine it ran on pre-dated the Java Virtual machine of 12 years.
I was so much into interactive fiction back in the day, that I made a Z-Machine interpreter for the now obsolete PocketPC :) Ah, the memories!

9 years ago
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Bump!

9 years ago
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ahah sadly never played it! But I love old games :p The first thing I've played was c64 plus a lil bit of snake on an old IBM pc, then I've got my Amiga 500 :D I remember spending hours on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_500:_The_Simulation

9 years ago
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Bumping for easter egg :)

9 years ago
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aMAZEing :D

9 years ago
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I used to play a couple MUDs back in the day... Gemstone and Darkness Falls that were pretty good. Ah, my 486dx2-66 was the shit back then.

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Although it was a foray outside of pure text, Return to Zork is one of my favorite games of all time.

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Me and my brothers used to try and play Return when we were pretty young. Basically we just clicked on stuff until other stuff happened. We figured out the first few screens but never had the patience to go further.
Years later we tried to play it again but because CD drive speeds had increased so much it ran several times faster than intended. I just remember that crow going in circles at turbo speed. It was pretty funny to us at the time.

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Yeah, I played it for a bit back when it came out (the 30th anniversary edition). Made it onto the heart of gold but never put enough time into it or looked up how to advance.

9 years ago
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I didn't play these games, but I enjoy parser-based adventures, at least some of them
While not parser-based, Sorcery! and 80 days on smartphones are very nice and modern "choose-your-adventure" text-based games

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NES person myself thumbmasher games like no other BigFoot olympic games ..;p

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I played zork a long time ago. I was likely, and frequently eaten by a grue.

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Only played very few text adventure games. Apparently I'm too young for that - it's not often I can say that =)

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I remember trying to play Zork often, but I was never very good at it, I was kinda dumb back then :(

9 years ago
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Asking "do you like classic games" is kind of pointless. I think almost all gamers like classic games, unless they're the type that's really hung up on graphics.

I like some classic games, sure. Hell, some of my all-time favorites are considered "classic." Master of Magic, Star Control 2, Jagged Alliance 2, and many others. But there are also a lot of classic games I really don't like, or which I used to like but which have aged so badly I never playe them anymore.

9 years ago
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I had played a lot of Zork and other classics when they were new. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came out when I was in grade school, and I'd gotten stuck at the beginning right after Earth is destroyed and you end up in darkness. So I picked up the book, hoping it would help out. It didn't, but I was basically introduced into reading novels because I played text adventure games.

I have to admit that the low quantity of games I had available to me back then helped me have the patience to work through games I became stuck in. Nowadays, I have so many games that if I get stuck I just go play a different one and never come back. It makes it a lot harder to enjoy the classics a second time, even for nostalgia. :)

9 years ago
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i agree very much with your point, in fact i see that a lot with music or physical games.
in the past (before p2p, i mean) people used to have access just to a regular amount of discs and tapes, so they listened a lot to them and (let me say that) had the chance to really appreciate the good ones and support them by buying. nowadays downloading music (outlaw downloading, i mean) is so extended that almost anybody feels entitled to download pretty much anything, thinking that this is a good thing. in reality now people is missing a lot of focus that before we had because of being the access much more restricted.
physical games, i see this in the young kids. nowadays all the kids (at least in my country) are covered by presents from the family and from the friends, lots and lots of bullshit games that are mostly crap. again in the past, due to different life level, gifting to the kids was in general more restricted. it might seem good that now we can give them more than we could receive in the past, still i maintain that in the past we played our few games until wear destroyed them, now there's so many games around that kids are bored of them very soon and abandon them.
sometimes less is more.

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Insert "twisty passages all alike" joke here

9 years ago
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Closed 2 years ago by andreadandrea.