It's been weird seeing news articles about the first three  Zork  games this past week. The fact that Microsoft has officially put them into the public domain is certainly newsworthy, and offers a (likely naive) hope that this will set a standard for the future of older titles, but these games are extremely important to me as both player and scholar of gaming history, and deserve a closer (and, naturally, more personal) look than they're being afforded by the recent news coverage. So let's grab our trusty battered brass lamp and delve into the ruins of the Great Underground Empire, to LOOK AT, EXAMINE, and INSPECT the original  Zork  trilogy. It's essentially sheer luck that my first exposure to interactive fiction, as we call it today, was the first  Zork . If I played anything prior to that, it didn't make enough of an impression for me to remember it. The uncle responsible for the hand-me-down Commodore 64, the first computer to belong to me personally, proba...

It was a dark and stormy night…what does reading that evoke in your mind? Is there a mental, or even physical and audible, groan when you see or hear that in a story? Perhaps you don’t have such an immediate reaction, but, cliché or not,  the phrase still brings to mind the gloomy and wretched environment it's meant to draw you into. After all, who wants to be out in the rain, and in the dark , no less? It can make you feel like Garbage . That isn’t to say a good walk in the rain can’t be refreshing, but we’re talking about a dark, and likely very cold, night... doesn’t seem like the best of times (though possibly the blurst of times) to be out in a storm. Recently, I came across a quote “'It was a dark and stormy night' - we can do better than that!” It's the challenge that inspired this post, so... Can we do better than that? Well, certainly we can do better than that. It's actually strange to the question asked directly rather than an assumed hypothetical. Whil...

Recently, I've been undertaking a task that I've been putting off for... literal decades, now that I think about it - retrieving and sorting the books that went into bins in my parents' basement when I first moved out of their house. As we've talked about plenty of times, you can glean a lot about person from their chosen media, and our selves are no exception. While a lot of books I uncovered were from my teens and early twenties, there were a few favorites going back to when I was much younger. One of the most beloved books that greeted me for the first time in nearly twenty years was  The Book of Lists ,  accompanied by two of the follow-up volumes. They're the kind of book that, thanks to easy-to-access internet, seem downright quaint now, but there was a time when they, especially the first volume, were my constant companions. At the time, I think I was more focused on the sheer amount of knowledge (some of which was rather... spicy for a kid my age) available ...