Zarf Updates

I posted a couple of weeks ago about Infocom tie-in novels, with a bit of a digression on the work of George Alec Effinger. It turns out that I have a response from Effinger to relay!

Not a response to my 2026 post, obviously. Effinger passed away in 2002. But his books were mentioned on Usenet in 1997. It was a thread about the "Groundhog Day" trope, which brought up Effinger's books The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time. (The first Effinger that I read, as it happens.)

Anyhow, someone made a rather dismissive comment to the effect of "...before Mr. Effinger ran out of ideas and was reduced to writing things like 'The Zork Chronicles'." And guess who showed up to riposte?

Welcome to June. The latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Deadline!

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

Deadline was Infocom's first non-Zork game, and they pulled out all the stops to make it feel like a new and different thing. Which made my job a lot more interesting!

A musical city, a record store, and a 90s soundtrack album! Okay, and a Lovecraftian adventure game.

• Phonopolis
• Wax Heads
• Mixtape
• Call of the Elder Gods

Now that I think about it, the Lovecraftian adventure has a puzzle where you control alien technology through musical resonance. See. It all fits.

Last week someone passed around a link to a post: "Classic Zork Novels, Now in E-book Format!"

That's right, it's another instalment of "Somehow, obscure Zork media returned"!

This time we're stepping out of the digital realm and into the world of official Zork (and Zork adjacent) prose. Presented here are four novels:

• The Lost City of Zork by Robin W Bailey
• The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger
• Enchanter by Robin W Bailey
• Wishbringer by Craig Shaw Gardner

Thanks to the work of dedicated fans, these books have been available as scanned pages for many years in places like The Internet Archive. But with advances in OCR tools, it was now possible for me to convert these pages back into editable text with no compromise to accuracy.

-- PaulloDEC, May 13th

See the post for download links. PaulloDEC has now followed up with downloads of the four Zork-themed gamebooks.

So, this is convenient. These aren't rare books. As the post says, you can easily find scans of them (e.g. here). The used paperbacks are also not too hard to track down. I have Wishbringer and The Zork Chronicles on my shelves. But .epub files are easier to tote around.

The post got me looking at the books again, though. They're rather puzzling artifacts.

Titanium Court is a stylized match-3 battle game in which you are possibly kidnapped by fairies. I loved it and I didn't like it. I mean, I didn't like playing it. I loved the game.

It's doing two things. (Two big things. An infinite number of tiny things.)

One big thing is to build a narrative game on top of an RTS/autobattler on top of a match-3. All of these mechanics are coupled. Throupled? You arrange your battlefield by making groups of three tiles disappear; this also gains you resources, with which you buy units. Winning battles (or losing them) advances the storyline, as does exploration and dialogue; but you also occasionally take a shower, which is a match-3 grid of soap, water, and introspection.

The other big thing is to tell a story in you go to fairyland. I mean you, the person reading this review. Not "the protagonist" or "Wendy Darling" or "Alice". Not me -- I already went and came back. You.

"What is the first computer game that you played?" One of those social forum threads which is really about reader demographics rather than games. Still, I tried to remember.

No, my answer wasn't Adventure. I played Adventure in '79 or so -- but before that, I probably ran into Oregon Trail or Lemonade Stand or one of those other BASIC games on a school PET machine. And I definitely played one of the Star Trek variants on a neighbor's Apple 2 (not a II+, this was way early).

But there's also a game that I played at the Ontario Science Center in... man, I really don't remember when. Certainly 1980 or earlier. It might have been before or after my initiation into Adventure.

I will describe the game. You tried to contain a firest fire. The game was built in an arcade-like cabinet, but it was not a commercial arcade game. You had a graphical map of a forest, done in colored ASCII art. You had a cursor controlled by d-pad-style buttons. There was an info display showing wind speed and direction.

A fire got started. (One red square!) You had to control the spread. Your tools were water-bombs -- very limited supply -- and setting back-fires. Maybe you could drop firefighters as well; I don't remember.

I do remember that if you were fast and lucky, you could bang the cursor over to the initial spark and water-bomb it before it spread. That was the ideal outcome. Otherwise, things got out of control real fast. I didn't grasp the scenario well enough to use backfires effectively, but I understood the cheese-it solution.

A couple of months ago I referred to a quote from Infocom's internal ZIL manual:

That post was about the social context in which Steve Meretzky wrote those words. So I didn't get into what the ZIL tokens meant.

But this week the question came up on the Visible Zorker Discord. Let's get technical!

(This post is also available on my Patreon.)

The common thread this time is "the id". I don't mean the games are horny; they're not. (Although PSI has "flirt" dialogue options.) I mean somebody wanted a specific thing and made a game that catered to it. You want a style of puzzle that videogames don't do much, or you want a building-climber with zero risk of falling, or you want 3000 books piled on the floor. Here you go.

• Puzzle Spy International
• Murder at the Birch Tree Theater
• Gecko Gods
• Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!
• Legacy of Kain: Defiance: Remastered

Three months ago, I launched the Visible Zorker Patreon with a promise: fund me and I will create a new Visible Infocom game every month.

You did! And now the tree bears fruit.

I decided to put the games on a two-month delay, so that Patreon supporters would have a leg up. I worked on Visible Zork 3 in February; I made it available on the Patreon page on March 1st.

Two months have passed. (Happy Workers' Day!) And thus Visible Zork 3 is now live on the project page. The source code repository is also live, licensed under the open-source MIT license.

Enjoy the lonely, shadow-lit, eerily silent world of Zork 3... It's a bit of a tonal shift from the first two games, isn't it? The cartoonish treasure-hunts have been replaced with a somewhat philosophical meditation on virtue. (One might compare the route Ultima 4 took a few years later.)

To be sure, there are still some brightly-colored puzzles left over from the original MIT Zork. The blend isn't entirely smooth. But it's the wrap-up we have for the world of Zork... well, until Enchanter crashes back in. That will be another episode.

The 2026 Hugo Award finalists are up. Awkward for me: I really like many of the nominees, but I haven't read (seen, played) a majority of any category. So I can't give a useful overview or say that any given work is "best of the year".

I'll just recommend a bunch!