Interactive Fiction

Here are some good starting points for those new to interactive fiction...
A Beginner's Guide to Interactive Fiction
A Beginner's Guide to Playing Interactive Fiction

The original Zork trilogy and The Undiscovered Underground that you played on your VIC20 a long time ago are now free downloads for DOS, available from Activision! But Zorks II & III must have been zipped with one of those fancy new GUI zippers, because they wouldn't selfextract under DOS or Windows 3.11, even though they are DOS programs. (I had to unzip under Windows 95 to play them in DOS; that's just not right.) But they're kind of hard to find there (though it's theoretically easier since they added a search function) and as of 8 March 2001 the download links were broken. A better place to look was The Zork UnderGround Academy, which also had walkthroughs for all the Zork games, and other info as well, but it got trashed by a "server outage" and restoration was not possible. So I rezipped the games and have included a walkthrough or FAQ that I found for each one. When you unzip, be sure to restore the directory structure; Zorks 1 through 3 have a datafile in a data subdirectory, and by default want to save savefiles in a save subdirectory... and the datafile and the default savefile have the same filename!

Zork — Zork II — Zork III — Zork: The Undiscovered Underground

The first three can also be found at the infocom-if.org downloads page.

Those and more can be found at The Zork Library.

A huge green fierce snake bars the way!