Visible Zork 3 is now available to all

Friday, May 1, 2026   (updated 19 hours later)

Comments: 7   (latest 2 days later)

Tagged: if, interactive fiction, zork, zork 3, infocom, visible zorker, patreon, zarf

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.

A screenshot titled "The Visible Zorker: Zork 3". The left side of the window shows the opening of Zork 3, up to the command TURN ON LAMP. The right side shows a list of ZIL function calls and the message "The lamp is now on."

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.

EDIT-ADD: I meant to add some bits of trivia from the Zork 3 source, but I forgot when I was writing up this post last night. Let me just drop one in:

The Royal Puzzle ("CHINESE PUZZLE" in the 1979 MIT Zork source) is credited to "WILL WENG". Who the heck is Will Weng? A quick search reveals that one Will Weng was the crossword puzzle editor for the New York Times from 1969-1977! Surely the same person?

Weng was succeeded as NYT crossword editor by Eugene T. Maleska, who was succeeded in 1993 by Will Shortz. The latter names are very familiar to me from Games Magazine in the 1980s, but I did not remember Will Weng at all. How he came to contribute a puzzle to an MIT computer game is sadly not recorded.

More readings on Zork 3:

Behind the curtain, in early-access land, the release cycle rolls on. Patreon supporters got hold of Visible Deadline in April. They got Visible Starcross today.

Now that the pump is primed, you can expect a new game every month on the project page. Deadline will appear on June 1st, Starcross on July 1st, Suspended on August 1st. There may be a one-month break after that, as NarraScope is going to eat up a bunch of June (and then push out the following schedule slots).

Here's some previews of upcoming goodies:

A diagram of the first flood of the Robner mansion. The locations of Rourke, Dunbar, and Mrs Robner are marked. Heavy blue lines run through some of the rooms, showing routes that the characters follow when navigating the map. Light pink lines join other rooms; these are sight lines down hallways. Part of the map of Deadline, showing the routes used for NPC movement and visibility. (Here is a larger view including the grounds.)

A chart drawn in radial white lines on a starry background. Geometric symbols with four-digit designations are marked in orange and magenta. A legend on the right, on a silvery background, says "M. C. S. Starcross: Mass Detector Output". My recreation of the Starcross Mass Detector Chart. (High-resolution source archived here.)

(Of course, if you join the Patreon at the $4 level, you get in on the early tier. That means you get Deadline and Starcross today, Suspended in June, and so on. This is the carrot. There is no stick; everything winds up open-source eventually.)

As you see, I am trying to add a little something creative and insightful to each game. It's not just lists of objects and variables. I will also do new, high-quality scans of feelie material that I have access to. (See my Deadline scans here! Mind you, I really have to rescan those pages in 600dpi lossless. I didn't get this A3-bed scanner for nothing.)

So where are we with the Visible Zorker? I feel pretty good about it!

I originally said that I was aiming at $500/month in Patreon support. That number was, as I admitted, an arbitrary goal. But the Patreon is over the $300 mark as I write this. I expect that will bump up if Zork 3 makes a splash. Now that we're in the swing of a public release every month, maybe it will move significantly.

So I'm happy with the response. More importantly, I'm having fun. This is fun! The Visible Zorker was a genuinely new thing in the world. Nobody else is doing it. Oh, plenty of people could have done it -- there's no real technical challenge in there -- but I thought of it. I get to be the one. I can build in my sense of history, my sense of design, and my sense of whimsy.

It's a real boost in a world which seems intent on treating us all as machine parts, one mouse-click away from outsourcing.

So I'm on board to do the next batch of games. Maybe next year I'll feel burned out and overwhelmed. I can't say. But right now, I'm jazzed to start the next one. (Suspended is up next! What a great piece of visual design that package was.)

Thanks for coming on this -- can I say adventure? Adventure, I said it -- with me.

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