Way back when PCs were almost as rare as hen's teeth and an Apple was seen just as often as IBM PCs, a small program that was 100% text based took the country by storm. Years later, when video games were getting better, the Zork series of games were still just as popular as ever.
It's hard to believe that a text based game could ever overcome the excitement of the moving pictures and shoot em up games, but Zork did this and more. Dozens of text based games evolved from this one simple game. The reason that the game was so popular was due to the fact that it was a thinking game with dozens of puzzles, tricks and traps to avoid.
Moving along into the more recent past, the company Infocom created a graphic game shortly after CD-ROMs were put on the market. The first of these was Return to Zork and although the movies and graphics are somewhat primitive by today's standards, at the time there was only one other game on the market that even came close to it.
This game was the reason I even bought a CD-ROM as soon as I did. I just had to play this game. The puzzles are quite difficult, but if you ever played any of the text games, you know exactly how to approach them. One of the most important things to remember is that there are no wasted bits of information or useless items in the game. Everything has some value in the game at some point. Often, these items have to be used with some other item in the game.
After several weeks of playing, I was able to complete the game, but not get the maximum score possible. Therefore, I played it several times in order to "beat" it. Little did I know that it is quite impossible to get the top score and still win the game. I discovered this small fact when I bought the clue book and walk through. Not even the creators of the game had been able to make the highest score the game allows. You see, often the points are awarded for a choice that is made by you on what is the best thing to do with an item in your inventory. You do this thing, you get so many points and lose the item, but if you do that thing, you also get points and get to keep the item.
This is a wonderful game and even almost a decade after I bought it, it is still a joy to play. I trust that it will remain a fun game for you as well.
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