| Legends of Zork | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) | Jolt Online Gaming |
| Platform(s) | Web browser |
| Release | April 1, 2009 |
| Genre(s) | Adventure |
Legends of Zork was a browser-based online adventure game based on the Zork universe created by software company Infocom.
| Legends of Zork | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Developer(s) | Jolt Online Gaming |
| Platform(s) | Web browser |
| Release | April 1, 2009 |
| Genre(s) | Adventure |
Legends of Zork was a browser-based online adventure game based on the Zork universe created by software company Infocom.
A Zork massively multiplayer online game was originally announced in January, 2009. [1] [2] However, the developers recanted that MMO statement, calling it a "casual adventure game", instead. [3] Game mechanics were similar to those of Kingdom of Loathing , and there was no charge to sign up. [4]
Players controlled a recently fired traveling salesman for FrobozzCo International, now fighting monsters and solving puzzles for zorkmids (the world's currency). A class, leveling, equipment and skill system give each character unique attributes. Free accounts were given 30 action points per day, but could pay a fee to receive more and other "perks".
Upon defeating monsters, players may have recovered enchanted Double Fanucci cards which could be arranged into four-card hands called "gambits", which enhanced types of skills. In addition, having face cards in a gambit could provide other enhancements, like additional hit points or inventory capacity. Legends of Zork's Double Fanucci cards were drawn by artist Greg Brown and colored by Jim "Zubby" Zubkavich. [5] [6]
Legends of Zork received mixed reactions from the gaming community, with many reviews complaining that the game was not true to the original Zork . [7]
Alec Meer of Rock, Paper, Shotgun criticized the game, saying it's "as though someone designed a micropayment system then awkwardly shoved a very crude game on top of it." Meer goes on to describe the game as "rudimentary" and "unfunny." [8]
Kenneth Newquist of nuketown.com called it "a barebones MMORPG-style game designed for the casual gamer" which was all about number crunching, although pointed out that it was not necessarily a bad thing, comparing the game to the Facebook app D&D Tiny Adventures. He criticised the lack of a story within the game, but admitted that later additions to the game in the form of quests came some way to fixing this problem. He also said "Still, it is Zork-like. The locations, the artwork, and the tone all evoke the Infocom games I loved." He conceded that while it did not come up to his expectations (although he was still playing it several months after release), other players might, and thought that as "an amusing little app, and as a lunch time diversion, I think it works." [9]
Jolt Online Gaming quickly killed off the game on May 31, 2011 without any warning notice to its adventurers.
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called Cornerstone.
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphic text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.
Zork is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code or developing a compiler for each system.
Return to Zork is a 1993 graphic adventure game in the Zork series. It was developed by Activision and was the final Zork game to be published under the Infocom label.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos is an interactive fiction video game written by Steve Meretzky and published by Infocom in 1986. It was released for the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Apple II, Macintosh, Atari 8-bit family, Atari ST, Commodore 64, TI-99/4A and MS-DOS. The game was Infocom's first "sex farce", including selectable gender and "naughtiness"—the latter ranging from "tame" to "lewd". It was one of five top-selling Infocom titles to be re-released in Solid Gold versions. It was Infocom's twenty-first game.
Brian Moriarty is an American video game developer who authored three of the original Infocom interactive fiction titles, Wishbringer (1985), Trinity (1986), and Beyond Zork (1987), as well as Loom (1990) for LucasArts.
Beyond Zork is an interactive fiction computer game written by Brian Moriarty and released by Infocom in 1987. It was one of the last games in the Zork series developed by Infocom. It signified a notable departure from the standard format of Infocom's earlier games which relied purely on text and puzzle-solving: among other features, Beyond Zork incorporated a crude on-screen map, the use of character statistics and levels, and RPG combat elements.
Free-to-play video games are games that give players access to a significant portion of their content without paying or do not require paying to continue playing. Free-to-play is distinct from traditional commercial software, which requires a payment before using the game or service. It is also separate from freeware games, which are entirely costless. Free-to-play's model is sometimes derisively referred to as free-to-start due to not being entirely free. Free to play games have also been widely criticized as “pay-to-win”— that is, that players can generally pay to obtain competitive or power advantages over other players.
Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz is an interactive fiction computer game, written by Steve Meretzky over nearly 18 months and published by Infocom in 1988. Although it is the ninth and last Zork game released by Infocom before the company's closure, Zork Zero takes place before the previous eight games. Unlike its predecessors, Zork Zero is a vast game, featuring a graphical interface with scene-based colors and borders, an interactive map, menus, an in-game hints system, an interactive Encyclopedia Frobozzica, and playable graphical mini-games. The graphics were created by computer artist James Shook. It is Infocom's thirty-second game.
Libris Mortis: The Book of Undead is a book which is an official supplement for the 3.5 edition of the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game. The book covers the fictional undead within the D&D universe and comprises seven chapters, introducing new content for Dungeon Masters and players, as well as providing general information about undead.
Robert Bates is an American computer game designer. One of the early designers of interactive fiction games, he was co-founder of Challenge, Inc., which created games in the 1980s for the pioneering company Infocom. After Infocom's dissolution in 1989, Bates co-founded Legend Entertainment to continue publishing games in the Infocom tradition, but with added graphics. Notable games that he has designed, written, or produced include Unreal II (2003), Spider-Man 3 (2007), and Eric the Unready (1993), listed as Adventure Game of the Year by Computer Gaming World magazine and also included on the 1996 list of "150 best games of all time". In 1998 he wrote the award-winning game Quandaries for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has twice been the chairperson of the International Game Developers Association, which honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. Bates has written extensively about game design and development in works such as the 2001 book Game Design: The Art and Business of Creating Games, which is commonly used as a game design textbook in college courses. From 2011–2014, Bates was Chief Creative Officer for External Studios at Zynga. He continues to work as an independent consultant with various publishers in the games industry.
Jolt Online Gaming was an online gaming company hosted in Ireland. Its main site provided news, reviews, and interviews concerning upcoming games on consoles and computers, while its gaming network Jolt Online Gaming Network hosted and published free-to-play browser-based games. Notable works included Utopia, Utopia Kingdoms, Legends of Zork, and NationStates 2.
Runic Games was a Seattle-based American computer game company formed by Travis Baldree, Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer, Peter Hu, and the Flagship Studios Seattle team responsible for Mythos. It was a subsidiary of Perfect World. In 2009, the company released Torchlight, a single-player action role-playing game. They released a sequel, Torchlight II, in 2012. It was at this time the developers revealed they were no longer pursuing plans to create an MMO in the Torchlight universe.
Aether is a video game designed by Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel and published by Armor Games, released on September 3, 2008. Players control a lonely boy and an octopus-like monster that the boy encounters, solving puzzles on different planets to restore them from monochrome to color. The pair travel through space by swinging on clouds and asteroids with the monster's elongated tongue, searching other planets for life to which the boy can relate. It is also a part of The Basement Collection.
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