This was spotted by somebody using my Visible Zorker tool, but it’s not a Parchment bug. It’s replicable game behavior (release 75 and up) (including the “canonical” r88).
In the Kitchen, do
> open sack
> get lunch
> drop lunch
> look
A hot pepper sandwich is here.
A bottle is sitting on the table.
The glass bottle contains:
A quantity of water
A brown sack
The brown sack contains:
A clove of garlic
This is purely a display error. The table object contains the sack and the bottle, but DESCRIBE-OBJECTS gets confused and indents “A brown sack”, which makes it look like it’s in the bottle. (If you pick up the lunch again, you get a sensible display.)
It seems like this must be well-known, but I don’t see it in the community bug lists for Zork 1.
Finding a new glitch in such an old game isn’t all that surprising… if anything, the surprising part is how small the glitch is… Usually when I hear about new glitches in decade old games, it’s something major, like the recent discovery of a glitch in Double Dragon that’s actually useful for speedrunning or the discovery that there’s a glitch in The Japanese version of Super Mario Bros 2 that remains in Super Mario All-Stars’s The Lost Levels that interacts with how the save function/level select works in a way that lets you push things beyond the limits in the 8-bit version and eventually get truely glitched levels… And of course, just about every Arbitrary Code Execution method I hear about is for a decades old game.
Does make me wonder what the record for oldest glitch at time of first documentation is… Though, given the nature of the Internet, that can be very hard to determine since there’s no telling how many glitches were documented on blogs, personal websites, forums, etc. that no longer exist and took that documentation with them to the digital graveyard… or were only ever published in old lesser known/less widely circulated magazines that have not been preserved or were only mentioned in untranslated, non-English sources.
I have never noticed this ‘bug’ before while playing zork - so I thought I would check it out. There appears to be a couple of indent issue here - Both the sack and the bottle have initial FDESC descriptions, If you ‘open sack’ and ‘open bottle’ those are removed because the TOUCHBIT is then set and you get the ‘Sitting on the kitchen table is:’ list - but, if you have dropped the lunch in the kitchen, that sentence is ‘indented’ by one character - like this, which looks odd :-
A hot pepper sandwich is here.
Sitting on the kitchen table is:
A glass bottle
The glass bottle contains:
A quantity of water
A brown sack
The brown sack contains:
A clove of garlic
Also, following the instructions in the initial reproduction steps of ‘open sack’ then ‘get lunch’, if you ‘look’, you get the FDESC description of the bottle and its contents list, followed by ‘There is a brown sack here.’ message (which is the default for an item at the location, not on a supporter - which it still is, as it’s still on the table).
A bottle is sitting on the table.
The glass bottle contains:
A quantity of water
There is a brown sack here.
The brown sack contains:
A clove of garlic
The PRINT-CONT Routine is responsible for all of this, so I had a play around with it and got something working that seemed to ‘resolve’ those, but after 40+ years I am not sure it needs a ‘fix’ - It was an interesting distraction though.
- It was an interesting distraction though.