The Zork Anthology. You’re on the threshold of a whole new experience, for ahead of you is the extraordinary anthology of the Great Underground Empire. Once you step through the door to Zork, you leave the world of arcade games and trite fantasies behind and enter the dimension of your imagination. Download Picasa 3.9.141.303 for Windows. Fast downloads of the latest free software! Picasa can’t compete with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or other similar programs. However, it comes with basic editing options, which empower Picasa as an image organiser. However, if you’re still looking for an alternative on Android or Mac.
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(based on 67 ratings) About the StoryAn old, oddly youthful man turns toward you slowly. His long, silver hair dances about him as a fresh breeze blows. 'You have reached the final test, my friend! You are proved clever and powerful, but this is not yet enough! Seek me when you feel yourself worthy!' Game Details Language: English (en) Current Version: Release 17 / Serial number 840727 License: Commercial Development System: ZIL Forgiveness Rating: Cruel
Sequel to Zork II, by Dave Lebling, Marc Blank Adapted from Zork, by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling Spoofed by Rance the Dungeonkeeper, by Jan Åberg |
Editorial Reviews
Adventure Classic Gaming
In some ways, Zork III: The Dungeon Master is the original Myst clone. There is a sliding blocks puzzle and some mechanical puzzles, all in the context of little plot and lots of ambience. There are also some standard inventory based problems, and a few very strange people to deal with. As such, there is not much of a story to propel you through the dungeon, just your love of exploration.
-- David Tanguay
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SPAG
Gloom and emptyness
It is hard to put a label on the mood of Zork III -- 'brooding,' perhaps, but that would make it more ominous than it is. If anything, it seems like a T.S. Eliot scene, with its barren landscapes and wisps of mist and enigmatic encounters with unidentified characters. (...) The adjective 'gray' never appears, as far as I can tell, in any of the room descriptions in Zork III, and yet there is a grayness about the game environment that makes the feel of the game far more real, more coherent, than the other two, even if the scenes themselves are less picturesque than those of Zork II.
-- Duncan Stevens
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SynTax
A smaller game than Zork I and II and this time you are not collecting treasures. The parsing is good and the descriptions of locations excellent as usual, with plenty of atmosphere.
-- Joan Dunn
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Most Helpful Member Reviews
, August 16, 2021I'm trying to work my way through the Infocom catalog, posting my thoughts on a gaming forum all the while.
Zork III is an ambitious and subversive game, and I feel Marc Blank was courageous in turning Zork, Infocom's cash cow, on its head. It assumes a tone of glum enervation; the whole world seems faded and spent. Our former treasure hunter is all grown-up: wisecracks and platinum bars no longer hold their attention. The Adventurer doesn't want to PLAY a cave game; rather, they want to RUN the game.
The game world is Zork's most geographically and tonally consistent to-date. The only parts that stand out, rather jarringly, are those ported from the mainframe version of Zork. Whether people enjoy it or not, the Royal Puzzle has nothing to do with anything Zork III is about. I wonder if Blank felt obligated to port these areas over untouched, just as I wonder if Lebling had done with Zork II's Bank of Zork puzzle.
Zork III's new scoring system is a clear indicator that this isn't the Zork you're used to. There are only seven possible points in the game, and you get a point when you're on the right track, story-wise. It's appropriate: after all, in Zork III's opening crawl, you are told to seek The Dungeon Master when you are 'worthy.' It's a harder thing to quantify than 'get the twenty treasures of Zork and put them in your trophy case.'
There are some fine puzzles to be found: the scenic vista and GOLMAC puzzles are especially enjoyable. One affords a sneak preview of 'Zork IV' and the other is one of the game's only sources of Zorkian humor.
It is a shame that the second part of mainframe Zork embedded in the game is the final puzzle. It doesn't really feel relevant, and there's no sense of climax. It's just a silly little logic doodle and easily brute forced. At least the zany trivia quiz from mainframe Zork--absent here--engendered a sense of culmination.
Reviewing text dumps from both mainframe Zork and Zork III, one sees that the final scenes of both are almost identical, though Blank did append a brief concluding paragraph. This paragraph is, not surprisingly, about power, and it is one of the only times (in any Zork game) that we are given insight into the Adventurer's motivations. I've seen the idea floating around that this conclusion can be read as a metaphor for the birth of IF as a medium. Whether such arguments are right or wrong, I must agree Zork III is an invitation to us, the players; it calls us to think about the potential powers of IF.
Despite Zork III's missteps there remains a sense that something remarkable has happened. It would seem that Marc Blank has attempted to declare (prematurely, I'll admit) The End of The Cave Game. Zork III is in its way a critique of the genre's idealization of material gain and acknowledges, at long last, that there there is something lost when a civilization falls. Zork III is, if nothing else, the moment in which Zork escapes ADVENT's shadow.
I suppose it is long-established now that Interactive Fiction is art, but it wasn't always so. I would argue, whether it is art or not, that Zork III is IF's first overtly artistic gesture.
Zork III is a foundational work and rating it with this or that many stars would lose sight of this truth.
I am playing Starcross next and will, as promised, give it a rating.
Postscript: I have seen comments, here and elsewhere, about unwinnable games, and I have to say I find them rather overstated and ungenerous. It requires roughly five minutes and 110 turns to revisit every possible puzzle, including the optional sailor scene, before the earthquake. This is without a map or notes.
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The finale in the Zork series is a big change from the first two games. The game is smaller as to puzzles and map, but much bigger on ambiance. This game feels like a refining purgatory, with a chance to demonstrate your courage, mercy, trust, and bravery. The setting is dreamlike and thoughtful. The puzzles are very difficult. For all of them, it is easy to try to solve them, get part way through, and have no idea if you succeeded or failed. Almost all of them are time-based, requiring you to wait, do several actions in succession, or to return frequently to a given place. Some places (like the land of shadow or the viewing table) will stay in my mind for a long time.
The Royal Puzzle breaks up the gameplay a bit, but I loved it. I first solved it in MIT Zork; as a mathematician that is terrible at most IF puzzles, it was fun to have a puzzle that I could finally solve on my own. I literally used a walkthrough on every other puzzle in this game.
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This game picks up where Zork 2 left off (minus your inventory- I really could have used that magic wand!). You're stumbling down an endless stair to a cavern where you find your old friend, the brass lantern.
This game departs a bit from the first 2 games, in that the object is not to find all the treasures and drop them in a case. You're still looking for all the treasures, but they aren't apparant as such, and the game is looking for certain behaviors from you.
One complaint on this game is that one of the puzzles (the most important one, you might argue) is timed, so in order to gain the permanent light source, and one of the treasures, you need to do the puzzle RIGHT AWAY, otherwise you render the game unwinnable. And in Zork 3, it is easy to make the game unwinnable and not realize it.
It was possible in Zork 1 and 2 also, though it was much more apprarant- if you died at the volcano and you left some treasures in the balloon- they were unreachable. In Zork 3, you need to decide at one point whether to go for a staff or treasure, how to respond to a mysterious viking ship, choose between to solutions to a shifting wall puzzle, decide what items to try to steal during a time travel puzzle, decide whether to kill someone attacking you or not (and the choice is not obvious),decide WHEN to do a puzzle involving teleportation- and the wrong selection on any of them makes the game unwinnable, and you never realize it as such unless you go back and do things the RIGHT way.
Now, I don't know that this is UNFAIR, because I like difficulty, I would only wish I knew what I was supposed to do before I screwed myself up. If you do what many people might and explore the entire world right away, you've already lost too much time.
That being said, some of the puzzles are freaking BRILLIANT! A puzzle where you need to slide a mirror is difficult to visualize, but very smart. The shifting room puzzle gave me that real 'AHA' moment as well. The time travel puzzle makes sense when you think about it, it's just not exactly clear how time travel relates to the time machine itself. If you're a fan of Zork I and II then you shouldn't be really surprised by the solution of the mysterious ship puzzle, and you should relish the chance of being able to walk past some grues in the dark. (A feat you will repeat in Spellbreaker, and possibly in Sorcerer).
The game does tie up the trilogy nicely, provides a good ending point, and gives you the challenge you deserve, without bogging you down in inventory management (very much) or much of a light puzzle (if you run out of light you either missed the first puzzle or did something stupid, like entering a lake with a torch).
If you like Zork I and II you will like this as well, just be ready for a bit more serious a tone and more difficult puzzles.
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Recommended Lists
Zork III appears in the following Recommended Lists:Favorite IF Authors (represented by games) by Denk
This list does not include authors, where I have only played one of their games. Thus great games such as Anchorhead and Blue Lacuna are currently not included.
Infocom Salvaged Adventures by Tristano
List of the Infocom adventures that were recovered from the salvaged Infocom hard drive, and their source code was published on GitHub in April 2019 by Jason Scott for educational purposes and in an attempt to preserve them from...
Favorite 'atmosphere' games by MathBrush
These are games that are fun because of the atmosphere and plot more than the puzzles. These games are not too hard and not too easy. They generally have a big over-arching theme. I have included most horror and comedy games in other...
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more specifically, games with time travel as a gameplay element.
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Games with great puzzles by Molly
Games that have great puzzle-design. The puzzles need to be logical and internally consistent.
This is version 18 of this page, edited by Petter Sjölund on 27 September 2021 at 9:26am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item
Talk about a blast from the past, Zork 1: The Great Underground Empire is one of the best text-based games of its time. What is really cool about the first game in the Zork series is that it is really a benchmark video game when it comes to storytelling.
Who Am I?
Zork 1 is a game that is very heavily story driven. The character you play as does not actually have a real identity. Instead, you know that you are just an adventurer, an adventurer who is on a quest to get as much treasure and loot as you can. You are exploring dungeons in a very dangerous land. Finding the treasure is not your only goal. You have to also make it out alive and if you can do this you will be the one known as the dungeon master.
It is kind of cheesy stuff, but back in the 80s fantasy movies were a big deal so the story is actually pretty neat. I am sure older gamers will get a wave of nostalgia from the story. Younger gamers who are a little more curious about text-based adventure games will also have some old school fun.
Go East, Pick Up Sword
The way that you play Zork 1: The Great Underground Empire will sound very odd to younger gamers. You do not actually control a sprite on the screen, instead, you do all your actions in the game through typing. This is what a text-based adventure is all about and Zork 1: The Great Underground Empire is actually one of the most advanced games in this genre of its days.You see traditionally in a game like this you would type in stuff like. “go east” “pick up sword” “eat food” unlock door” and so on. Zork though changed things up by requiring the player to be more specific due to the fact it could understand many more verbs. So whereas other games would have you just type “take lamp” Zork is more sophisticated and lets you type “take lamp and place on desk” “swing sword at enemy” and so on.
First Part Of A 3 Part Story
As the name suggests Zork 1: The Great Underground Empire is only the first part of the story. There are two other parts to the Zork saga. Actually, depending on the version you manage to pick up, you could end up with the whole trilogy all wrapped up in one story. I think that the first game is either going to hook you or it is not.The games for me do not really “improve” as the series went on, but as this was more advanced and interactive than other story-based adventures of the day it was not really needed. You have to remember with a game like Zork, your imagination is one of the most important aspects of it.
A game like Zork 1: The Great Underground Empire is kind of hard to recommend to the masses. For an older gamer like me, I find games like this pretty interesting and thought checking it out after all these years was a lot of fun. On the flip side of this though, I can see why this would not be everyone’s cup of tea.
6.5/10
Pros:
- One of the best text-based games of its day
- The start of a huge franchise
- It tells a very interesting story
- Makes you be quite specific with what you type
- Very easy to find online
Cons:
- Not for everyone
- Some might find it frustrating