Zork 1: The Great Underground Empire

Creative Work
Year: 
1981
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The first part of the bestselling Zork trilogy, and a close descendant of Adventure, the first work of interactive fiction or text adventure game as the genre was known at the time. Zork I was Infocom's first game, and sold 378,987 copies by 1986. Similarly to Adventure, the game unfolds in a maze-like dungeon, where the user (or adventurer) must battle trolls and solve puzzles in order to find twenty trophies to bring back to the house outside which the game begins. 

Pull Quotes: 

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Critical writing that references this work:

Title Author Year
An Emerging Canon? A Preliminary Analysis of All References to Creative Works in Critical Writing Documented in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base Scott Rettberg 2013
Collaborative Narrative Scott Rettberg 2014
Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media Jeremy Douglass 2007
Destination Unknown: Experiments in the Network Novel Scott Rettberg 2003
Digital Fiction and the Unnatural Astrid Ensslin, Alice Bell 2021
Electronic Literature Scott Rettberg 2014
Electronic Literature: Documenting and Archiving Multimodal Computational Writing Scott Rettberg 2019
Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World Jill Walker Rettberg 2003
Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture Alexander R. Galloway 2010
Generating Narrative Variation in Interactiv Fiction Nick Montfort 2007
Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace Janet H. Murray 1998
Hyperfiktion und interaktive Narration Beat Suter 2000
Tangibles and Storytelling Chin-Jen (Arthur) Chang 2012
Techno-historical Limits of the Interface: The Performance of Interactive Narrative Experiences Andrew Hutchison 2009
The Emergence of Electronic Literature Exhibition Catalogue Scott Rettberg, Jill Walker Rettberg 2013
Theory and technology for computational narrative: an approach to generative and interactive narrative with bases in algebraic semiotics and cognitive linguistics D. Fox Harrell 2007
Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction Nick Montfort 2005
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Jill Walker Rettberg