There’s a review about Zork II. In the following link there is this text that I don’t understand:
It is Infocom’s third Zork game and is their first game.
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The word “their” most likely refers to the list of authors earlier in the paragraph.
It is likely meant to mean that it’s the first game that group of authors wrote together. I don’t know whether that is accurate though.
P.S. I think I missed your point, which is that Zork II won’t have been Infocom’s third game.
It’s a wiki so you could fix it 
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I suppose someone counted Dungeon as the first Zork game and home-computer Zork as the second? Doesn’t really work, though, since Dungeon wasn’t released by “Infocom”.
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I believe this site is primarily focused on things outside of the original six games. Flathead trivia, the timeline, and so forth. I can see that the entries for the original six Zork games are rather short.
In this, it is somewhat like the expanded Encyclopedia Frobozzica, which is itself a fan-written extrapolation from the abridged Encyclopedia Frobozzica that was published along with Return to Zork.
edit: no, the abridged version was fan content, too.
This is a lot of words written just to say that the wiki is not necessarily concerned with Zork II as a game, which is a likely cause for this error.
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The first was the PDP-11 version of Zork, 1980.
Then the development of the Z machine allowed the split porting of Zork to microcomputers, in three parts, that is, Zork I, II and III. hence, Zork II is the third Infocom title published.
Hope to have clarified the “mystery”…
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While I do not doubt your account, I wonder if you could provide a source? Unless I misunderstand Stu Galley, the first product published by Infocom was Zork I–for the PDP, that much is true–on eight inch diskettes.
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I think that there are a few problems with the text.
- PDP-10 ITS/MDL Zork was written by Tim Andersson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling and Bruce Daniels but was never a part of Infocom. I actually think the source is “owned” by MIT.
- Zork II was the second released game from Infocom (1. Zork I, 2. Zork II, 3. Deadline, 4. Zork III, 5. Starcross, …).
- Zork II is usually credited to Dave Lebling and Marc Blank. If I remember correctly most of the MDL Zork parts put in Zork II are actually originally designed by them (Vulcano with Balloon is by Blank, Bank area is by Blank, Alice area is by Lebling). Of the new parts, the baseball maze is by Lebling.
I think the real issue is that zork.fandom.com isn’t really made by or for Infocom experts.
Encyclopedia Frobozzica, Unabridged is a well-established and more careful site.
(also IFWiki.org obviously. But that’s not really aimed at having articles on every single item in the Zork universe.)
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