Let's play Zork + Colossal Cave Adventure

Playing Let's Play!
21

Episode Z5

Starting a fresh new run, we returned to the maze of twisty little passages, all alike, to document the remaining room exits. In the time since the last episode, we converted the maze map from a spreadsheet to a Lua program that can compute a shortest path between any two rooms. For instance, to get from room A to room G, the program tells us to go S, E, UP, SW, E, and E:

$ lua zork-maze.lua A G
A	s
B	e
C	up
S	sw
E	e
F	e
G

We were close to finishing the matrix of room connections last time. The grating unlocks with the skeleton key and communicates with the outside, as expected. In the room with the skeleton, picking up the rusty knife caused the elvish sword to emit an ominous flash of blue light. The sword glows also when the thief is present. Mapping out the last few passages of the maze, we discovered a Cyclops Room southeast of room H! Not feeling up to dealing with a cyclops, we left him alone for now.

We experimented with less violent ways of dealing with the troll. We managed to knock out and disarm the troll without killing him, but he remains in the room and still prevents exit to the maze or the passage to the Round Room, even as he pleads for his life. Giving him his axe back makes him resume the battle. In the end, we found no other recourse than to kill the troll again.

We finally managed to deliver some treasure from underground to the trophy case. You get some amount of points for picking up a treasure, and some additional amount for placing it in the case. These are some point values we observed:

Treasure Find Deposit Total
Egg 5 5 10
Coins 10 5 15
Painting 4 6 10
Platinum 15 5 20
Sceptre 4 6 10

We were robbed once by the thief in the maze, then attacked and killed by the thief in the Studio. On another occasion, we were robbed by a seedy-looking individual in the Studio. It was still uncertain whether the “thief”, the “‘lean and hungry’ gentleman”, and the “seedy-looking individual” are all the same person.

At the altar in the temple, we tried the ritual of ringing the bell, reading the book, and waving(?) the candles, but nothing happened. We returned to the dam area, which we had seen before, as a ghost, in Z3. The wrench didn’t work on the bolt on the control panel. We tried pressing the buttons in the maintenance room: the red button toggled the lights, the yellow and brown buttons clicked, and the blue button broke a pipe and started flooding the room.

New personal best: 104/350 points, rank of Junior Adventurer.

The completed map of the “all alike” maze, including a correction to the UP exit from room F:

N E S W NE SE SW NW UP DOWN
Troll A
A A Troll B D / / / / / /
B / C A / / / / / / D
C D / / B / / / / S /
D A X1 / C / / / / / /
X1 / / D / / / / / / /
S C X2 / / / / E / / /
X2 / / / S / / / / / /
E / F / E / / / / I S
F / G H E / / / / N X1
G / / / G F X4 / / / /
H / / F N / Cyclops / / / /
I E J K L / / / I / M
J / I / K / / / / M /
K / I J M / / / / / L
L X3 K / / / / M / I S
X3 / / L / / / / / / /
M / / / / Grating / L K / J
Grating / / / / / / M / Clearing /
X4 G / / / / / / / / /
N / / F H F / / N / /
Cyclops H staircase?

Topics mentioned:

2 Likes
22

FWIW, though this may already be widely known, it was news to me - I just booted up r88, r52 and r119, and interestingly, in r52 and r119 if you “open mailbox” and “throw leaflet”… you die. You get killed. You throw the leaflet at yourself and die.

In r88, you are asked what you want to throw the leaflet at.

But if you answer “me”, you still die, from being hit on the head with the leaflet, falling over backwards, and breaking your neck.

So, I haven’t tried out r119 yet, but if I’m finding these oddities in the other versions too, how bad can r119 be? :smiley:

1 Like
23

Just wanted to drop in and say this is very amusing. Given that I like old games, I know both of these back to front, but I just like seeing the reaction (the reactions to the mazes of twisty little passages are especially good).

I look forward to what happens next, and how you react once you get into puzzle solving. At this point I think you’ve been everywhere you can get to in Zork without solving more puzzles, although you were kind of on the right track with the dam. (However there’s a part of me that hopes you ended up letting yourself get drowned in the maintenance room, just for laughs.)

For Colossal Cave, the “all alike” maze is, I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say, more like the similar one in Zork; there’s distinct sections with bottlenecks between them. I’m sure you’ll do just fine, although there is one slight bit of evil to beware of…

1 Like
24

Episode A5

We returned to the maze of twisty little passages, all alike, that we had just seen the start of in the last episode. We adapted the maze-solving Lua program from episode Z5 and set it to work mapping this maze in Adventure. (Cutting out the spreadsheet middleman.) We got robbed by the pirate, which was an inconvenience as he took a treasure item we could have used to mark a room. In the maze, we were attacked by dwarves with unaccustomed frequency. We had a suspicion that the rod might repel them, and that, the rod having been dropped to mark a room, they saw an opportunity to attack; or that there might be a dwarf generator somewhere in the maze. We died twice to the dwarves and had to be reincarnated.

Fairly deep into the maze, we found a pit that led back down to the bird chamber in the early part of the cave. From there, we gathered more items and returned to the maze through the entrance. We mapped out a couple more rooms, but then the pirate attacked again and took our remaining items. Not counting dead ends, we visited 12 rooms in the maze, but we did not yet exhaust all the exits.

apples     	n→apples, e→orange
bananas    	up→onions, down→onions
beans      	e→corn, s→radishes, w→quiche
bird       	
corn       	n→dead end 3, e→hot peppers, s→beans, down→dead end 4
dead end 1 	e→onions
dead end 2 	w→onions
dead end 3 	s→corn
dead end 4 	up→corn
fromage    	n→mushrooms
hot peppers	e→onions, s→corn, w→mushrooms
mushrooms  	n→mushrooms, e→hot peppers, s→onions, w→fromage, up→west end
onions     	n→hot peppers, e→dead end 2, s→dead end 1, w→mushrooms, up→bananas, down→bananas
orange     	down→bird
quiche     	e→beans
radishes   	n→apples, e→salad, s→radishes
salad      	e→radishes
west end   	s→mushrooms

Topics mentioned:

1 Like
25

Episode Z6

At the end of the last episode we had just broken a pipe in the Flood Control Dam maintenance room, and the room was rapidly filling with water. We managed to grab the tube of gunk and the screwdriver and get out before the room flooded completely. (We had already gotten the wrench earlier.)

We read a bunch of in-game lore from the dam tour guidebook and the cover of the matchbook. We also found you can burn the guidebook with a match—and if you are holding the book at the time, you burn with it. We came back as a ghost at the Gates of Hades. Even as a ghost, we could not re-enter the flooded maintenance room. We came back to life as before by praying at the altar in the temple.

We tried opening the jeweled egg with the screwdriver, but this only had the effect of breaking the mechanical canary inside (just like when we had dropped the egg from the tree).

We tried using a match to burn the piece of paper in the studio; it didn’t work. We found the candles at the altar burned down to stubs; we’ll need to try inspecting them earlier in a run to see if they were always that way.

We brainstormed things to do with the tube of all-purpose gunk. Might it make the metal ramp in the cellar climbable? No. We tried it on the bolt on the control panel at the dam, but the gunk “isn’t a lubricant.” We tried the remaining directions from the Round Room, but we had already found all the ones that work: N, E, SE, S, and W.

We solved the puzzle of the Cyclops: feed him the sandwich and the water. Up the stairs from the Cyclops is the… Treasure Room! Which contains the thief, who seems exceptionally difficult to defeat in combat.

Life A User’s Manual Chapter 74

and at the very bottom, a world of caverns whose walls are black with soot, a world of cesspools and sloughs, a world of grubs and beasts, of eyeless beings who drag animal carcasses behind them, of demoniacal monsters with bodies of birds, swine, and fish, of dried-out corpses and yellow-skinned skeletons arrayed in attitude of the living, of forges manned by dazed Cyclopses in black leather aprons, their single eyes shielded by metal-rimmed blue glass, hammering their brazen masses into dazzling shields.

East of Eden Chapter 51.1

Adam asked, “Do you know where your brother is?”

“No, I don’t,” said Cal.

“Weren’t you with him at all?”

“No.”

“He hasn’t been home for two nights. Where is he?”

“How do I know?” said Cal. “Am I supposed to look after him?”

Adam’s head sank down, his body jarred, just a little quiver. In back of his eyes a tiny sharp incredibly bright blue light flashed. He said thickly, “Maybe he did go back to college.” His lips seemed heavy and he murmured like a man talking in his sleep. “Don’t you think he went back to college?”

Topics mentioned:

1 Like
26

The dam guidebook is great. I think the whole “Dimwit Flathead” thing was originally intended as a joke explanation as to why someone built a big flood control dam underground. It was only later on in Infocom’s career that they gave the Zork universe a more coherent history. (I think the dam area is the only section to reference Flatheads in Zork I? They definitely come back in later games in the series.)

That wasn’t the only case of the developers adding lore to add more of an explanation to the game, by the way. In the very earliest versions of Zork, just like in Adventure, you would fall in a pit if you tried to wander about in the dark. Then one of the developers realized this made no sense in the house’s attic. And thus, enter the grues.

Dealing with the dam will, I think, unlock the solution to at least one of your other current problems.

1 Like
27

I wouldn’t use the word “coherent” as such. :)

(Yes, there is a timeline, but it’s all “stuff we invented for a particular game and may have forgotten about later.”)

As for the real timeline, remember that there were many Flathead references in the original MIT Zork. Zork 1 wound up getting FCD#3 and the “mighty ramparts of the Flathead Mountains”, but it looks like the first references written (1977) were the dam, the gold zorkmid, the Flathead stamp, and the gaudy crown.

2 Likes
28

Oh, I forgot we had a mid-1977 version. The only Flathead mention there is the dam, so that was indeed first.

2 Likes
29

There’s lore about the Flatheads in the manual as well.

Raising the kingdom’s tax rate to just over 98%, Dimwit began a series of grandiose projects that soon earned him the title “Flathead the Excessive.” Among these projects: the construction of mammoth Flood Control Dam Number Three (a massive edifice with virtually no useful purpose, since it never rains underground), the creation of the Royal Museum (to house the crown jewels), the defoliation of four hundred thousand acres of lush forest (to erect a nine-bloit-high statue of himself in the Fublio Valley) and the production of enormous granola smelters of Plumbat.

This detail is mentioned by Dave Lebling in the 2014 GDC classic game postmortem talk (at 9:52).

I went up in the attic of the white house. And it said, it’s dark—I hadn’t taken the lamp—and it said, it’s dark up here, you could fall in the pit. And sure enough, I fell in the pit. And so, I walked across the hall to Mark, and I said, Mark, I fell in the pit in the attic. And, so, he said, okay, do something about it. And so I sat down and I said, okay, well there’s a monster that gets you in the dark, then. So I invented grues.

30

The manual stuff was part of the 1984 gray box rerelease. The 1980 folio “blister packs” for Zorks I, II, and III contained no Flathead references AFAIK. I’m not sure if we know who wrote the browsies for the reissues.

edit: correction, there is one mention of Flathead in the Zork II folio manual as a matter of necessity, but it doesn’t do the kind of “worldbuilding” that the later manuals do.

The Wizard, formerly the personal sorcerer of Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive, still rules the cavern with an iron (though somewhat absent-minded) will.

2 Likes
31

Yeah, at the time the Zorks we being released no one was thinking too seriously about the lore. I don’t think the current in-universe date was ever noted until it was needed for something in Zork III. It was just enough that it’s clearly many years after the dates in the dam guidebook and a few other places.

32

Episode A6

We finished mapping the maze of twisty little passages, all alike, and finally found the secret room where the pirate keeps his treasure. (A dirty trick: it’s the only diagonal passage in the whole maze.) The pirate robbed us twice on the way, but in the end we got it all back PLUS a treasure chest. Unlike in Zork, there was no confrontation with the pirate in the treasure room.

While dropping off our haul of treasure back at the house, we got a message that the lamp was getting dim. So that’s the purpose of the batteries! We went back to the other maze (the one of twisty little passages, all different) carrying coins to buy batteries. But the lamp ran just out one room away from the vending machine.

We spent a little more time considering the Mystery of the Shadowy Figure. The dwarves, this time, seemed no more dense or bloodthirsty than usual. The purpose of the black rod is still unknown.

We reached a new score high-water mark of 109, but finished the episode with 89/350 points, still a new personal best, rank of novice class adventurer.

apples     	n→apples, e→orange, w→radishes, down→dead end 8
bananas    	up→onions, down→onions
beans      	e→corn, s→radishes, w→quiche, down→salad
bird       	
booty      	se→fennel
broccoli   	n→radishes, s→dead end 6, w→salad
corn       	n→dead end 3, e→hot peppers, s→beans, down→dead end 4
dead end 1 	e→onions
dead end 10	e→orange
dead end 2 	w→onions
dead end 3 	s→corn
dead end 4 	up→corn
dead end 5 	w→fromage
dead end 6 	w→broccoli
dead end 7 	up→radishes
dead end 8 	up→apples
dead end 9 	e→garlic
fennel     	n→orange, w→garlic, nw→booty
fromage    	n→mushrooms, e→dead end 5, s→fromage, w→fromage
garlic     	e→fennel, s→orange, w→dead end 9
hot peppers	e→onions, s→corn, w→mushrooms
mushrooms  	n→mushrooms, e→hot peppers, s→onions, w→fromage, up→west end
onions     	n→hot peppers, e→dead end 2, s→dead end 1, w→mushrooms, up→bananas, down→bananas
orange     	n→garlic, e→fennel, s→dead end 10, w→apples, down→bird
quiche     	e→beans, w→salad
radishes   	n→apples, e→salad, s→radishes, w→beans, up→broccoli, down→dead end 7
salad      	e→radishes, s→broccoli, w→quiche, up→beans
west end   	s→mushrooms

Topics mentioned:

1 Like
33

Oh, good, you are persistent. No doubt there were some amount of players back in the day who stopped trying the diagonals in that maze and never found the pirate’s treasure chest, short of someone telling them about it.

There’s some stuff coming up that I’m really looking forward to seeing the reactions to. I will say that you are mostly done mapping mazes.

1 Like
34

Episode Z7

We finally took the time to map out the overworld. It is not terribly complicated, but is slightly maze-like. There are four rooms that have same short description, “Forest”, and two of these even have the same long description: “This is a dimly lit forest, with large trees all around.”

In getting past the troll, we saw a new and unexpected interaction. After attacking three times and knocking him out, “You suddenly notice that the bloody axe vanished”! Could this be the long-sought non-violent (or at least non-fatal) way to bypass the troll? We didn’t dwell on it, as we had other plans in mind. We were on our way to the dam to get the matchbook, with the intention of trying the bell, book, and candle ritual again.

In what would become a recurring pattern, the thief interrupted our plans. We experimented a bit more with alternatives to direct combat. We found that you can give things to the thief, and (other than valuables) he eventually gives them back. You can even give the thief a “quantity of water”, which he somehow carries without a container.

We tried pressing the dam maintenance room buttons in a different order: brown, blue, yellow, red. The blue button still breaks a pipe and floods the room, red still still toggles the lights, and brown and yellow still just click. Whatever this puzzle is, we haven’t solved it.

We returned to the temple area and did the bell, book, and candle ritual, but this time at the Gates of Hell, not the altar. On the first try, we rang the bell, but took too long lighting the candles, and the magic dispelled. The bell became red hot and we had to wait for it to cool before trying again. But on the second try, it worked! Beyond the jeering spirits there was just one room, the Land of the Living Dead we have often heard spoken of. There was nothing there but a pile of unfortunate past adventurers and a crystal skull.

Being out of other ideas, we again engaged the thief in combat. We tried a few middling ideas, to no avail: throwing the sack, throwing the viscous gunk, burning with the torch. The thief disarmed us of our only weapon, the nasty knife. We managed to retreat and recover the rusty knife (which we have been calling the “cursed knife”). Attacking with the rusty knife caused the player character to slit their own throat! Say—that gives me an idea.

Topics mentioned:

1 Like
35

Oh, wow you guys found a bug. Did we know it let you give the water to the thief, and that he could drop it causing a “quantity of water” to appear in the room?

I have something to say about the matchbook, but it’s mostly trivia about the mainframe version of Zork rather than any sort of spoiler for Zork I.

And speaking of programmer humor, have some Zork I-related trivia: there was an earlier build of Zork where the maintenance room buttons were described as “labeled in EBCDIC”. This was apparently a joke that people who got on the big mainframes in the ‘70s would find hilarious, but they eventually dropped from the commercial games because most people wouldn’t get it. Basically “EBCDIC” was this text encoding scheme that was extremely hard to use, so saying that the buttons are labeled in EBCDIC was a novel way to say that you don’t understand the labels.

1 Like
36

Spoiler:

That would be such a cool way to deal with the thief! I wish it was implemented as a solution, but I’m pretty certain it’s not.

37

Episode A7

We first went back to the window on pit to ponder further the mysterious waving stranger. There’s a 25-foot gap across the pit to the opposite window. We don’t have any item big enough to bridge the gap. Where might we find a large item? This line of thinking sent us heading back towards the Giant Room. We took two unlucky deaths from dwarves, but bounced back.

Going east from the dusty rock room for the first time, we found a small pit with a stream. The stream is a place to refill the bottle with water without trekking all the way back outside.

We filled the bottle with oil from Twopit Room and used it to open the rusty iron door north of the Giant Room. Behind the door was a waterfall cavern and a jeweled trident. The trident seems like it could be a tool, besides its value as a treasure—opening the clam, maybe? There were several directions to proceed beyond this; we followed a passage that led to the Oriental Room and a Ming vase (which, when dropped, delicately shatters).

Past a misty cavern, we found an alcove and a tight tunnel, at the other end of which is a room, illuminated from within, that contains an emerald. The passage is so tight it required us to drop all our items, including the lantern. Even further within, there is a dark room, but we could not explore it without a source of light. We could, at least, get back out through the tunnel with the emerald.

We roundabout found our way back to the Hall of the Mountain King (where passages lead off in all directions) and tried other exits. East took us to the Hall of Mists. South led to a chamber containing jewelry. Southwest led to a secret passage and (um) a huge green fierce dragon, reclining on a Persian rug. We were trying to find a way past the dragon when the lamp ran out.

RIP little bird :‍(

Topics mentioned:

1 Like
38

“Is the rod dynamite?”

(I’ll just say I let out a bit of a chuckle at this one. But a rather evil one. Those of you who know the game, will know…)

2 Likes
39

If you want to hear more of the Dusty Rock Room radio show, play our game The Clock Tower and tune the radio to 103.5. “If it’s musty, rusty, or crusty, you’ll hear it on the Dusty.”

40

Episode Z8

We started by trying to put the plan into action of giving the rusty knife to the thief, to trick him into cutting his own throat. But GIVE RUSTY KNIFE TO THIEF doesn’t work: he just takes the knife from you and kills you with the stiletto as usual. Drat! That really seemed like it was going to be the solution. We tried a few other things, throwing the nasty knife at the thief and stealing his bag; nothing worked. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.

We discovered the DIAGNOSE verb, which tells you your level of injury and time until healing. (We would have known it already if we had read the manual, which we hadn’t.)

>diagnose
You have a light wound, which will be cured after 26 moves.
You can be killed by one more light wound.
You have been killed once.

Next we returned to the dam maintenance room to play with the buttons some more. This time, we did not press the blue button (which breaks a pipe and starts flooding the room). We pressed the brown button and then looked at the rooms in the vicinity—there was no apparent change. We returned and pressed the yellow button, and now the green bubble on the control panel was illuminated. With the bubble illuminated, we could turn the bolt on the control panel using the wrench, opening the sluice gates and draining the reservoir.

In the muddy bed of the drained reservoir, there was a trunk of jewels, and beyond the reservoir to the north, an air pump. The pump inflates the pile of plastic from the dam base, which turns out to be a magic boat. We didn’t try using the boat yet; instead we continued north through the Atlantis Room (with a crystal trident) and a strange near-copy of the Mirror Room/Tiny Cave/Winding Passage complex. We broke the new mirror, to see if there might be an effect on the other mirror we already knew about, but we did not get around to checking the other mirror this episode.

At one point, the thief entered the room we were in and dropped the tube of gunk, which we definitely had not touched this run. So what we had vaguely suspected is true: the thief can pick things up and move them around. Later we found the sceptre in an unexpected place, so it includes even treasure items.

North of the Atlantis Room we found the Slide Room. The words “Granite Wall” were written on one wall, which led to some confusing messages, but no useful consequences as far as we could tell. The slide leads back down to the cellar. There were other ways to go, too, which we did not get to yet.

As the final act of the episode, we went to the rainbow in the canyon and waved the sceptre. A pot of gold appeared and the rainbow turned into a solid stairway!

Topics mentioned:

1 Like