Causes of Zombification in Zork I and possibly other Infocom games

I completed it using the awkward troll method I described earlier. but just now I did the entire game as I would normally until reaching 350 points, then I used the bat and the boat to get 352. To quote Pitch Meeting - It was super easy, barely an inconvenience. :slight_smile:

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Wow, I love fiding weird exploits like this.

I think I remember reading about a bug in an early version of one of the Zorks where it’d let you “kill” yourself repeatedly even if you were already dead. This would keep subtracting points off your score and, if done enough times, would eventually cause the score to underflow to a big positive number of points. It’s probably in one of the bug lists on the web, I don’t remember the exact details.

Are there any other games (either Infocom or newer large games) where you can exploit a glitch to get more points than the maximum score? (A game being tricky with a “last lousy point” and listing a score of something like “101 out of 100” if you get it doesn’t count)

Yes. In all versions of Zork II, you can use the IT bug to give the demon a treasure over and over again, saying GET IT after every time. Even after he’s paid in full, you keep getting 2 more points each time.

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Zork 2 r48 counts the sword as a treasure. So you can win with 402 points.

(In r48, they switched from using the sword’s VALUE for the glow level to a SWORD-GLOW global. They also dropped the TREASURE flag and just checked for the existence of the VALUE property to decide what was a treasure. Those two changes make sense together, except they forgot to remove the VALUE property from the sword.)

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Some games don’t have a maximum score, but the community have found some glitches that give higher scores. We know there must be more glitches in Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder but haven’t been able to find them yet.

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Graeme Cree’s bug lists include an extra 25-point glitch in early versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and an infinite-point glitch in version 68 of Wishbringer.

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