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...