Would anyone object to a Zork 2086?

[jcompton]

@Draconis

The real question is, what aspects of Zork are you trying to emulate? The old-school feel of a lot of random milieus mashed together with fairly arbitrary puzzles that let you collect treasures?

…the graduate mechanical engineering puzzles…

Lots of interesting things that can be done with Zork, and even before you get to the 90s stuff it’s pretty hard to make it all hang together, because it was never really expected to.

[GUEmpire (The Great Underground Empire)]

Awesome, thanks very much! I’ll check out that podcast too. I really like The Great Underground Empire as a name, and made and commissioned a lot of thematic artwork and social media banners and stuff for it, lol.

[Pebblerubble (Peter Wiehe)]

@SomeOne2

Be honest: is that getting too old?

No, definitely not too old. I think Zork aged well, in other words it can compete with modern games imho.

But you must create something substantially different or else it would be pretty boring for everyone who has played the original.

[BogusMeatFactory (Jonathan Myer)]

To jump into the conversation, regardless of whether you use the Zork name or not, there is absolutely room for the collect-athon text adventure style.

Having a major emphasis on the puzzles over the narrative can be very cathartic. Having just recently gone through the zork trilogy and enjoying them thoroughly, flaws not withstanding (looking at you Zork 2 bank puzzle!), I think what is most important when making that style is that you create a nice hub with which to branch out into.

One of the weird issues I faced with Zork 3 was that there was no centralized base to call home and it felt very lacking because of it.

I am curious to see what you come up with and cant wait to see your progress!

[Zed (Zed Lopez)]

I tend to recommend an abundance of caution around potentially infringing intellectual property… but if I were doing it, my non-lawyer-self would be okay with naming a show that wasn’t using Infocom IP after a never-trademarked phrase associated with an Infocom game, like West of House or Great Underground Empire or Eaten by a Grue.

[SomeOne2 (Max Fog)]

Wow… This jumped up again!

[jkj_yuio]

I think this is a great idea. However, you’re going to have to dream up a lot of “zork” new stuff in the process.

I dont see this as bad. but it is a challenge.

[Mike_G (Mike)]

@Zed

I tend to recommend an abundance of caution around potentially infringing intellectual property… but if I were doing it, my non-lawyer-self would be okay with naming a show that wasn’t using Infocom IP after a never-trademarked phrase associated with an Infocom game, like West of House or Great Underground Empire or Eaten by a Grue .

I doubt Infocom could have trademarked “Grue” even if they wanted, seeing as it was copied from Jack Vance.

[Mike_G (Mike)]

@DeusIrae

And the trigger for getting such a letter would probably be if an automated search for typical Zork-y terms – Zork, grue, GUE, etc. – turns up your thing. So to my mind, you’d either just file off all the serial numbers up front, or go ahead with the game you want to make while accepting that there’s a small chance you’ll need to file said serial numbers off later.

Or you release a game anonymously through Tor or similar.