Zork, the White House, and Just Adventure

Welcome to Zork.
West of House.
You are in an open field west of a big white house
with a boarded front door.

Without a doubt, the above opening lines from Zork I are the most famous in adventure gaming history. That white house is the cornerstone upon which not just adventure games, but the entire industry, was constructed, and now, thanks to the generosity of Activision, it is part of the Just Adventure masthead.

The Zorkian white house has long been the entry point for adventurers worldwide. Not an inn for travelers or a gnarled adventurer in a leather coat, but a weather-beaten, boarded-up, desolate white house. That structure was the entrance to a world full of wonder and magic, Flatheads and Grues, underground empires and endless nights with little or no sleep. There is not a gamer among us who did not form a mind's eye image of what that white house should look like (for remember, the Zork series was in text!), and when Return to Zork was released in 1993 and we finally, after 14 years, got our first-ever glimpse of that legendary building, we all breathed a sigh of relief--it looked exactly like we had imagined!*

In 1979, deep in the recesses of M.I.T., two great minds, Dave Lebling and Marc Blank, and a mainframe gave birth to a text-only underground universe called Zork. Keyboard adventurers could visit the Great Underground Empire (GUE), master the powers of the Wizard of Frobozz, and search for the Coconut of Quendor. We had become active participants in an interactive adventure, and for many of us life would never be the same. Zork was the first game to use an interpretive English parser that understood whole sentences rather than two-word commands. This Zork game was then divided into a trilogy by a newly formed company named Infocom and fed to a ravenous group of hardcore gamers. The heart and soul of the Infocom games was imagination, and Zork was the grandmaster of a parade of classic games that seemed like they would never end! Over 4 million adventurers have made the continuing Zork saga the best-selling adventure game series of all time.

To state that Just Adventure is proud to have the beloved Zorkian white house associated with our site would be a major understatement. To know that Activision would entrust us with this hallowed symbol of adventure gaming that has laid the groundwork for the past twenty years of gaming is indeed the highest honor I can imagine in this industry.

Just as that white house was the entry point for millions of adventure gamers, so too do we hope that Just Adventure will be your starting point for the past, present, and future of adventure gaming.

The Zork Trilogy is now available as freeware: Download the original text adventures and see what all the fuss is about!

*A big JA thank you to reader Stuart Feldhamer for pointing out that the Zorkian white house first appeared in the introduction of Return to Zork, not Zork Grand Inquisitor as we had originally thought.