Zork Anthology (1989)

You’re on the threshold of a whole new experience, for ahead of you is the extraordinary anthology of the Great Underground Empire. Once you step through the door to Zork, you leave the world of arcade games and trite fantasies behind and enter the dimension of your imagination. Every plot, every puzzle, every personality has been honed and perfected to make your experience uniquely realistic and involving. The Zork saga is text adventuring at its finest. Welcome to the Underground. Your greatest challenge lies ahead – and downwards.

Plot

The game takes place in the Zork calendar year 948 GUE (although the passage of time is not notable in gameplay). The player steps into the deliberately vague role of an “adventurer”. The game begins near a white house in a small, self-contained area. Although the player is given little instruction, the house provides an obvious point of interest.

When the player enters the house, it yields a number of intriguing objects, including a brass, battery-powered lantern, an empty trophy case, and an Elvish sword of great antiquity. Beneath the rug a trap door leads down into a dark cellar, which is revealed to be one of several entrances to a vast subterranean land known as the Great Underground Empire.

The player soon encounters a colorful host of dangerous enemies, including deadly grues who only prey on their victims in the dark, an axe-wielding troll, a giant cyclops who flees in terror at the mention of Odysseus, a vampire bat that can drop the player anywhere in the mine if encountered, evil spirits guarding the Entrance to Hades, and a nimble-fingered thief armed with a stiletto who makes mapping the maze difficult by removing or scattering any items that the player might drop to leave a trail.