Is this a bit like the bathrooms in Planetfall? “He has to sleep somewhere.” But neither thief nor Dungeon Master have a “quarters.” They have locations, I guess, but they aren’t really what I’d call “quarters.”
Is the cloud-stuff like a spider’s web? Beard shavings?
yeah, it’s odd and seems like wasted space, which is rare in early infocom games.
the wizard wasn’t part of mainframe zork, and i always assumed was created as a narrative device to give zork II a bit of plotting beyond a simple treasure-hunt. so, he’s new and, i guess, does have to sleep somewhere and this extra map area was thrown together to flesh him out.
or maybe it’s simply a case where dave lebling had the space for it, so why not?
I think part of it is the quality of text. It’s unusually difficult to make out what this space is. Now, we would see this kind of flex from Lebling in Spellbreaker (and to great effect), but this room is really unlike any other one in the Zork trilogy, isn’t it? I honestly have no idea what it’s like.
The Wizard’s Workshop from the same area also has no mechanical purpose, and we could have an equally tidy map if both quarters and workshop were removed, but it is at least clear what the workshop is. That is, we can fill in the blanks: it’s the space between the trophy room and and workroom.
Wizard’s Workshop
You are standing in the entry hall of the Wizard’s Workshop. Dark corridors lead west and south from here. The corridor to the west smells slightly of incense or candle smoke. The workshop door is open.
These lightly-described connector rooms were not uncommon. The quarters is a dead-end, which feels different.
Oh! Well that’s very interesting, thank you. Let’s lay them out.
<GLOBAL WIZQDESCS
<LTABLE
"sparsely furnished and almost monkish in its austerity."
"an opulently furnished seraglio out of an Arabian folktale."
"decorated in the Louis XIV style."
"overhung with palm-trees and lianas. The only furniture is a hammock."
"constructed of delicate and wispy cloud-stuffs."
"furnished in plastic and metal and looks like the control deck of a
spaceship."
"a suburban bedroom out of the 1950's, complete with bunk beds."
"a dank and dimly lighted cave, its floor piled with furs and old bones.">>
So the joke here is that it cannot be all of these things. It is either changing constantly (likely) or an impossible combination of things (unlikely). That is more interesting! I wonder what it is meant to reflect? The shifting nature of the Wizard’s consciousness, perhaps? It’s more than the average dead end.
I never entered more than once. In fact, it was only happenstance that I entered on my last playthrough—I just wanted to make sure it was in my transcript.
I guess we shouldn’t take the canon too seriously, but didn’t the wizard wind up here after his mental faculties were on the wane? I think this is cool but also out of character.
I appreciate the head’s up, I would never have returned.
For Infocom, who were very (and understandably) particular about waste of data and not repeating text, I’m surprised each string has a full stop at the end. I would have assumed that they’d remove the full stop and make it its own string after the randomly-choosing bit, in order to save space on the disk. Honestly kind of surprised me, but every author was very different in their layout of the games (especially Bob Bates)…
Also, spaceship? I didn’t know the Zork universe had spaceships! (Well, I guess Starcross but…)
Well, it’s always a tradeoff, right? Eight pentets for the period in each string (about 5 bytes) versus an extra opcode to print an additional string (variable number of bytes).
The workroom is interesting for the opposite reason; it’s like someone threw a noun grenade in there.
Wizard’s Workroom
This room is the Wizard’s workroom. A hall continues east and west, and a larger room lies to the south. There are many shelves and racks on the walls, but the Wizard’s workbench dominates the room. It is made of dark, heavy wood bound with iron. The workbench is stained from many years of use, and is deeply gouged as though some huge clawed animal was imprisoned on it. There are burn marks and even notes written in a crabbed hand. Many arcane items are scattered about the bench; alembics, mortar and pestle, small knives of various sizes, odd scraps of vellum, wax candles, and much more. In the center of a relatively clear area of the bench are affixed three stands - ruby, sapphire, and diamond - which form a triangle.
It works because it’s disorganized like the wizard is, and the clutter adds to a sense of arcane incomprehensibility.
I feel bad for anyone trying to make a Zork prequel in this setting, though! Expectations regarding noun implementation have changed a lot over the past 40 years.
Expectations regarding noun implementation have changed a lot over the past 40 years.