Reader's Digest Condensed Adventure
Feb. 2nd, 2012 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAlthough I do sort of chide myself about just reading about "interactive fiction" a lot more than actually buckling down to playing it, I do pick up things about it even in that. One of those small bits of information that caught my attention was that the famous "Zork I" had been trimmed down (just as that sold-in-stores "text adventure" had been trimmed down from a hobby project in MIT's computer labs in the late 1970s) to a size that could be completely loaded from cassette tape into the memory of a Commodore 64, instead of residing on a floppy disc and being loaded a bit at a time. It even so happens the "Mini-Zork" game file can now be downloaded from the central interactive fiction archive to be played with modern interpreters, and inspired in part by a weblog that's been working its way through old computer games of similar type getting to Zork I, I got around to playing the condensed adventure.
Although I hadn't been able to play Zork I until getting the "Lost Treasures of Infocom" bundle, something that's always amounted to "after the fact" for me, it's familiar enough to me. My first impression of "Mini-Zork" was that the text had been pared back; soon enough, I had figured out locations had been compressed together and started "mapping" in a spreadsheet, which doesn't have the visual flair of drawing on paper but doesn't leave you running out of space at the margins or having to erase boxes once you realise places are connected at "right angles." For all my familiarity with the puzzles, though, at one point I figured that because one particular treasure wasn't in plain sight it must have been left out of the game, and after mapping my way through the rigours of the "maze" I was left standing around wondering if there was an actual conclusion to this particular version of the game. Then, at last, I managed to remember what to do there.
Beyond whatever weight got loaded on to the "Great Underground Empire" after the fact, it's easy enough to think of Zork as a very typical text adventure of its day, where puzzles are to be solved and treasures are to be picked up just because picking up treasures has to be a good thing, except for that you could connect your verbs and nouns with "the" or string longer commands together. In being condensed, I suppose that "Mini-Zork" did give up some of the amusing responses to offbeat orders that helped enliven the floppy disc game. At the same time, I was able to muse about "working to the full use of limited space," and reflect in some small way on the further simplicities of "two-word" adventures loaded off cassette tape into computers with a quarter of the memory of a Commodore 64... although I know enough about those poky loads to wonder just how long it would take to load this particular game.
Although I hadn't been able to play Zork I until getting the "Lost Treasures of Infocom" bundle, something that's always amounted to "after the fact" for me, it's familiar enough to me. My first impression of "Mini-Zork" was that the text had been pared back; soon enough, I had figured out locations had been compressed together and started "mapping" in a spreadsheet, which doesn't have the visual flair of drawing on paper but doesn't leave you running out of space at the margins or having to erase boxes once you realise places are connected at "right angles." For all my familiarity with the puzzles, though, at one point I figured that because one particular treasure wasn't in plain sight it must have been left out of the game, and after mapping my way through the rigours of the "maze" I was left standing around wondering if there was an actual conclusion to this particular version of the game. Then, at last, I managed to remember what to do there.
Beyond whatever weight got loaded on to the "Great Underground Empire" after the fact, it's easy enough to think of Zork as a very typical text adventure of its day, where puzzles are to be solved and treasures are to be picked up just because picking up treasures has to be a good thing, except for that you could connect your verbs and nouns with "the" or string longer commands together. In being condensed, I suppose that "Mini-Zork" did give up some of the amusing responses to offbeat orders that helped enliven the floppy disc game. At the same time, I was able to muse about "working to the full use of limited space," and reflect in some small way on the further simplicities of "two-word" adventures loaded off cassette tape into computers with a quarter of the memory of a Commodore 64... although I know enough about those poky loads to wonder just how long it would take to load this particular game.