If you’re anything like me (i.e. overworked, totally stressed out, and in your early 30s), and was a gamer back in the ’80s and early ’90s, you probably played a few games in the Zork series.
Infocom’s Great Underground Empire captivated the hearts and minds of old-school PC gamers back in the very early 1980s, moving from their glut of notoriously well-written text adventures, to full-on graphical masterpieces in the 1990s. The group of MIT students who formed the original developer, Infocom, were eventually swallowed up by Activision in 1986, who in turn ended up doing quite well by the Zork name over the next decade and change. Activision developed three highly-rated (for the most part) graphical additions to the series in the late 1990s, Return to Zork in 1993, Zork Nemesis in 1996, and Zork Grand Inquisitor in 1997.
I still have fond memories of spending hours upon hours playing Return to Zork when I was in high school. “Want some rye? ‘Course ya do!”
I had heard some rumours of Zork making a comeback as a web-based MMO a few months back, and had signed up at LegendsofZork.com to see whatever the new developers (still working under the Activision label) had in store for the franchise. I thought it would be quite interesting to see how what was originally a text-based game, then a graphical point-and-click adventure, would translate into the not-so-new frontier of persistent, browser-based games.
There’s a press release about the game from this January over on the official site; although it’s purposefully quite vague, the impression I get is that this will be a pretty light-weight game for casual players. The press release describes it as an MMO, but from what I’ve read, it looks like the major parallel to MMOs will be the persistent game world. There’s only so much you can do on an interface that supports a wide variety of browsers, including the iPhone. Aside from that, and maybe some kind of public chat channels, I’d curious to see what they come up with in the limited capabilities of a completely web-based client. Of course, there are some other gaming sites out there that work pretty well entirely on the web, although they’re of varying degrees of complexity.
What prompted my post today was the email I got this morning from the developers, Jolt Online Gaming, which provided a little additional information about the game:
Now, a word about LoZ (as we affectionately call it). I’ve been reading a lot of speculation about what kind of a game this will be and I really want to set expectations correctly. LoZ is a casual adventure game. We’ve designed it to be the kind of game that sneaks into your soul and steals about 20mins of your time each day. It’s not an MMO (collective sigh of relief, I’d imagine). We genuinely think it’s a worthy addition to the Zork universe but at the same time we know that some of you won’t agree. You’ll have the opportunity to try it out very soon though.
Finally, I’ll start posting some game details on the blog about game mechanics and other *actual* detail in the next few days (we’ve been annoyingly vague on it).
According to the email, they’re in the process of balancing the game (which hints at a little more in common with MMOs than I had expected), and they’re looking for additional beta testers, so if you’re interested, drop an email to lozbeta@joltonline.com and get yourself signed up.
They’re also on Twitter (as are we), so you can follow them there and harass them with questions, if you’re as interested in the game as I am. And if you’re lucky, you won’t get eaten by a grue in the process. :)
