One of my favorite moments in gaming is from the text adventure Zork:
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The graphics are a little dated, it’s true. There are no explosions. No improbably-proportioned heroes and heroines strutting across post-apocalyptic landscapes, unburdened by the 800 kilos of random gear stuffed into their virtual mega-backpacks, oblivious to the fact that the electricity consumed by their lavishly rendered existences would keep a family of four alive in the slums of Calcutta for a year. There are no next-gen 3D graphics here. There are no 2D graphics here. No polygons. No color (it’s pitch black, after all) and no sound. No nothing. Just the stark imperative: Find light or perish.
The developers at Infocom didn’t invent the concept of the grue. But with those fourteen simple words they gave it life, sketching an irresistible portrait of this creature from a palette of darkness and suggestion and almost nothing else. Here was a beast that felt less like something created in some corporate design session than something discovered, as if the authors had stared into the shadows on the periphery of the human psyche and given a name to the form they saw there: grue. The original, primordial, long-forgotten reason why humans have always been afraid of the dark.
Zork was full of stuff like that — moments of unexpected depth and hidden significance, completely at odds with but perfectly suited to the 1980s-style command-prompt UI. You hear in the distance the chirping of a songbird. Okay, Commodore 64, but what does it mean? There were no quick-and-easy answers to Zork’s mysteries in those days — no strategy guides, no game wikis, no internet to host them on. You solved Zork, if you solved Zork, through trial and error, random subway graffiti, and the few hints you could glean from friends. That was part of its charm.
Sadly, nobody really plays text adventures anymore. Infocom shuttered its doors in 1989, just three years after being acquired by Activision. Zork’s puzzles have all been solved, her treasures looted, her rooms mapped and uploaded to wiki. The text adventure genre has become a graveyard, albeit a frequently-visited one. But the Great Underground Empire lives on, and the grue lives on, in the only place they really ever existed: the imagination. You can still take that trip today, if you’re up for a little spelunking: through Deep Canyon, past where the Frigid River runs, into the forgotten sub-basements of the strangely familiar ruins of Flood Control Dam #3. While you’re at it you might even try your hand at Zork’s final riddle, still unsolved:
How did this little game, with its sentences of homespun text, manage to pack more of an emotional wallop than half of the next-gen 3D blockbusters currently gracing the shelves of your local game shop?
For all their production value and technical largesse, blockbuster games have become a throwaway commodity, like Hollywood movies or new varieties of Hershey’s Kiss. As the Poet said, “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”…even though he never got a chance to play Destiny or Duke Nuke’em Forever. There’s a lesson in that, somewhere, if you dig for it—just don’t forget to bring a torch.
