r/zork

Thanks to everyone for the great response to the Zork Game Book web viewer I posted recently! A few folks rightly suggested that there ought to be a traditional e-book option for these titles too, so here's that; all four books as EPUB files.

Downloads via Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1N0hTRSnjxaHwtrvu-2KfYxQAjsHkXSLf?usp=drive_link

There's a couple of caveats with these, so please read before proceeding.

1. These books have many full-page illustrations, and the only way most users (with the exception of those using devices that can show two-page spreads) will see them is to turn the pages manually. All instances of "Turn to page X" have hyperlinks that will jump you directly to the specified page, but using them will result in the full-page illustrations being entirely skipped over. So if you want to experience all the illustrations, get ready to flip some pages.

2. Users of Apple Books may encounter a bug where hyperlinks jump to the wrong page; specifically one page too far. Reddit user FNTKB brought this one to my attention, but we've had no luck in confirming the cause or finding a solution. If you're an EPUB/Apple Books expert and you've got any ideas, please let me know!

3. Be aware that larger font sizes on your viewer will result in material (both text and images) being pushed onto additional pages. Not a big deal, but you may notice pages without page numbers as a result of this; rest assured the hyperlinks will still work correctly.

Massive thanks to reddit user FNTKB, who provided invaluable assistance in both testing these books on additional platforms and rooting out bugs that I'd have certainly missed. The final files are greatly improved as a result of their patience and expertise.

Finally, while these have been tested and checked in every way I know how, I've learned that stuff will always go wrong in unexpected ways. If you uncover any issues, please let me know in the comments, along with what kind of viewer/device you were using, and I'll endeavor to provide updated files in the same Google Drive folder.

Making good progress on a new player for MacOS with auto-mapping. Z3 testing seems stable, automatic mapping seems to be working well. Map rooms can be moved anywhere you want as the map grows. Map window can be detached and placed on different monitor or in a different Mac OS space. Really nice on an ultra wide monitor, where you can have a giant map on the right, and a reasonably sized parser on the left in full screen mode. Quite immersive.

Already played through Enchanter to the end for testing. Now working my way through the great underground. Hope to release this soon to the App Store with Z3 support. Z4+ testing indicates I've got some work to do before I release that. Lots of programatic differences to be worked through.

That's right, it's another instalment of "Somehow, obscure Zork media returned"!

This time we're stepping out of the digital realm and into the world of official Zork (and Zork adjacent) prose. Presented here are four novels:

• The Lost City of Zork by Robin W Bailey
• The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger
• Enchanter by Robin W Bailey
• Wishbringer by Craig Shaw Gardner

Thanks to the work of dedicated fans, these books have been available as scanned pages for many years in places like The Internet Archive. But with advances in OCR tools, it was now possible for me to convert these pages back into editable text with no compromise to accuracy.

With the hard part out of the way, all that was left was to tidy up the formatting and repackage them in the most widely-supported e-book format, EPUB, for folks to enjoy.

Download the Zork Books here.

Download the Zork-Adjacent Books Here.

The caveat here is that while I've been as careful as possible, I've not actually read these books through in search of errors. The conversion process is shockingly accurate, so if there's any issues they're most likely my fault - if you spot anything, please let me know! I'll be glad to make updates and replace the files with improved versions.

My brother who was the proud owner of a spanking new, whiz bang Commodore 64, 1541 disc drive, printer and plotter also received Zork 1 and Starcross and began spending time with his friends after school huddled around the desktop drinking soda, mapping graph paper and discussing the latest game puzzle they’d stumbled across while Journey hummed on the hi fi. I was the annoying eight year old brother - moving between GI Joes, my afternoon cartoons and these seemingly impossible puzzles they were working on. I was intrigued by the images my imagination conjured of the descriptions on the blue and white monitor screen.

Before long I’d acquired Sorcerer and Infidel for myself on my less impressive Atari 800XL. I REALLY struggled to just get out of the sorcerers guild but I loved considering the options and ways I could progress in the game. I picked up everything - something I STILL do in games like the newer Zelda games. I got a bit better but I was still young and the puzzles remained super challenging for my preteen brain.

Years passed - Hitchhiker came out, then Leather Goddesses, Ballyhoo, Moonmist, Plundered Hearts. I noticed the games were becoming increasingly hard to find - sometimes I’d see one at Waldenbooks but they were pretty hard to find - until they weren’t anywhere.

This was pre internet so I didn’t really have any idea Activision had bought them and frankly my mind was starting to turn to dirt bikes and girls more than lamps and mapping graph paper. I was delighted when Lost Treasures 1 and 2 came out and snatched them up for what, at such a young age, were already reasons of nostalgia. Then in my adult years the digital Lost Treasures came out and unfortunately fell away because Activision wouldn’t update the app.

So here I am today - still super nostalgic about these games that captured my imagination almost 40 years ago and are still with me.

Next up, it's four classic 1980s Zork-flavoured "Choose Your Own Adventure" books (or rather, the much less catchy "What Do I Do Now?" if you want to get technical), reproduced as an interactive website. Sick of getting sore fingers from the laborious task of turning pages? Now you can click your way to victory!

CHECK THEM OUT HERE!

This project actually started before the novel e-books, but ended up being a lot more complex and time-consuming. Like the e-books, all four of these books had to be screen-capped, cropped, cleaned and processed with OCR software, then tidied up, reformatted and eventually plugged into the web application. Additionally the illustrations had their own challenges; books one and two ought to look the nicest, as I actually purchased physical copies and produced new scans from which to extract them. Books three and four currently use lower-quality scans as their basis; I'll update them when and if I can get those books physically at a reasonable price. The front and back covers were also recreated using matching fonts and restored cover art.

This next bit might be unpopular; while a ton of human work went into this project, the actual coding of the web application was done using GenAI tools like Claude and Gemini. I've no web development background, so producing something like this by hand is totally outside of my skillset. Some of you may find this disappointing, and I'm hoping to produce some e-book versions as well that will sidestep the website entirely.

Please let me know if you spot any issues with any of the books, be they transcription errors or technical issues using the site. I would very much recommend using a desktop PC rather than a mobile device - I have no idea how badly borked these will be on mobile. And if you can think of any features that you think would benefit the user experience, I'm happy to hear those too. Enjoy!

Hello! I'm hoping this is an okay post for this subreddit...

I have recently discovered an anonymous game online that I believe to be inspired by Zork!

It's available at MrWhatsIt.com

I have been playing for a couple of weeks now and I am BEYOND stuck on how to proceed. There are no guides or anything available, unfortunately. The biggest breakthrough I've made with the game is realizing it is in the style of Zork and familiarizing myself with Zork in the hopes of gleaning some insight on how to navigate the game.

I was curious if any Zork-heads would be interested in checking it out/ giving advice on how to solve games such as this. The 'Try something else' field offers a wide range of possibilities, and I've been trying out all sorts of key words to try and trigger additional discoveries.