<!--
	Title: The Zork Anthology
	Source: QuestBusters, #114
	Date: 1994
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<div class="article-sidebar-box float-right" style="border: 4px double; border-radius: 1em;">
<span class="bold larger">Type</span> All-text adventure collection<br>
<span class="bold larger">System</span> IBM Required 512K RAM (!),
	single-speed CD, CGA (!), EGA, MCGA/VGA or SVGA, MSDOS 5.)+, 2
	MB hard disk<br>
	Macintosh Required Mac+, SE, II series, LC series, Powerbook &
	PowerMac series, single-speed CD drive, B/W or color, System 6.0.7 to 7.1,
	hard disk with 2 MB RAM
</div>

<p class="article-dropcap italic">You are standing in an open field west of a white
house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."</p>

Yes, it's back. They're all back, in fact — the first three games in the
original all-text *Zork* trilogy, plus *Beyond Zork* and *Zork Zero*.
As a bonus, Activision even threw in Steve Meretzky's own
personal all-prose masterpiece, *Planetfall*.

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/questbusters-zork-anthology-review/zork-i-cover-dark.jpg" alt="A very dark image of Zork I's cover art">

*Zork* began as a mainframe game in the late Seventies. The
back of the box refers to "two great minds" at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology who designed and programmed it, but nowhere
mentions the names of Marc Blank and David Lebling. Stu Galley
and others also contributed to *Zork*, which was inspired by William
Crowther's *Adventure*. The mainframe program, vast in size, was ultimately divided into
three programs when released commercially on the Apple II as *Zork I*,
*Zork II* and *Zork III*. Steve Meretzky and Michael Berlyn joined
the Infocom team as they branched out into science fiction and comedy.

## The GUE

<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/questbusters-zork-anthology-review/zork-ii-cover-dark.jpg" alt="A very dark image of Zork II's cover art">

After discovering the entrance to. *Zork*'s Great Underground
Empire (GUE), you'll delver deeper into some of the
most cunning puzzles yet devised by a designer of adventure
games. The puzzles may be difficult but are more fair than
many of today's graphic adventure conundrums. Subtle clues
and hints, for some reason, are more effectively conveyed with words
than pictures, and the early Infocom games all offers just enough clues to
get you through a puzzle — one of these days!

The program may be set up to play from DOS or Windows. You
can install the entire collection on a hard disk with only two free megs, or
choose which titles you wish to install. And you can count on blinding
speed, even on the slowest machines. After all, there are no
graphics to slow things down.

## Free clue books!

In addition to hundreds of hours of gaming, and some of the finest prose
to grace a computer screen, *The Zork Anthology* includes a 24-page book
with solutions to all the games in the collection. You also get some
maps that will save you lots of time. They are included for:
*Zork I* (the one with adventuredom's most maddening
maze, in which some people have been lost since 1979),
*Zork II*, *Zork III*, *Beyond Zork* and
*Planetfall*.

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/questbusters-zork-anthology-review/zork-iii-cover-dark.jpg" alt="A very dark image of Zork III's cover art">

[The weirdest thing happened while I was in the middle of the first
all-text game review I've done in a decade or so: someone called seeking
help in *Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*. That was one of the last
such games developed by the original Infocom team before Activision
bought Infocom and "Infocom" became a "label" rather than a
development company, so it struck me as one of those all-too-common-these-days
examples of synchronicity striking every 23 seconds somewhere
on this planet.]<br>
**Conclusions:** For those who never played a *Zork*, or any all-text
adventure, this collection is a must-quest. For those who played the first
*Zork* on a mainframes or one the early home computers, they are a
must-collect — Zork is a cornerstone in the legend and lore of computer
gaming, and as the leaflet in the mailbox from *Zork I* says, "Every computer
should have one!
