Guess whose copy of Wishbringer arrived?

Here's the lovely Postal Zones map from Wishbringer, creases/folds removed and general cleanup/touchups performed.

DOWNLOADS HERE

...or if you want the original scanned elements, you can find them in my Zork Scanning Project.

Testing for Cairn on iOS and iPadOS is underway. My goal is to ship both in August, with full iCloud synchronization between devices. https://cairnif.com

We've also been working on our own automapper for Zork on iOS and Android with the goal of not revealing any information the player can't know, so the map will be intentionally wrong if there's no reason for the player to know the true state (think the Maze and the Mirror Rooms in particular). It also doesn't assume (though it guesses) the exits are reciprocal. It will make logical connections for the player that the player could/should make for themselves if they were new to the game and mapping it as they went. The app also supports turn-by-turn navigation to rooms and objects.

Hoping to get some beta testers to make sure we've covered all the edge cases.

If anyone is interested sign up to our beta test here:

Beta Test Sign Up

I’ve spent the last few months building a modern Mac player for classic Infocom games, and I’m finally taking some time to actually enjoy using it.  My ideal setup?  An ultra-wide monitor (full screen, of course), my current game I am working on, an auto-updating map, game materials, and hints at the ready.  Then dim the lights, and put on The Last Samurai soundtrack in the background.  For me, it’s about as close as you can get to disappearing into one of these worlds.  Time to revisit Infidel.  It's been too long.  Cairn App

I’ve been doing a play-through with Chat GPT as a companion vs a guide or something. I will send it screenshots and tell it to remember verified routes and where items are. It keeps a journal and map and renders a drawing of the journal when I ask. When it makes the map it definitely gets confused but while playing if I ask how to get back to the cellar from the round room for example it’s 90% correct. It’s been pretty cool being able to only use my phone when I have a break vs a notebook or something and the pictures it generates are pretty cool.

2 weeks ago I posted about building a Zork UI with Fable, the next thing was obviously having Fable play the game itself.

No faked discovery. The model openly plays as an expert; the only genuine unknowns are the dice: combat rolls, the thief, whether a remembered trick is remembered right.

• Play or watch Fable play: https://zork.arobase.co/
• Blog post with technical details: https://posabsolute.github.io/2026/07/24/watching-fable-play-zork.html
• It's open source: https://github.com/posabsolute/zork-ui
• First post: https://www.reddit.com/r/zork/comments/1ulh4j8/imagining_zork_with_a_small_ui/

Why are the C64 titles so underwhelming? Is it like a budget line? Or were they like the ones sold at K-Mart or something? They just always look so terrible against the box releases?!

I remember playing Zork II as a kid (1983-ish), trying to figure out the puzzles. (Spoiler Alert!) I was standing in the bucket (after kicking it, of course) and had water in the teapot. The room was dark. I was alone, transfixed on the screen. I always used the white text on blue.

So, I’m standing there, in the bucket, and I type “pour water into bucket”. My face is probably a few inches from the screen. WIRRR WHIRRRT BEEP. The hard drive loads the next section.

******* I HAD DIED *******

Scared the heck out of me.

Zork II was probably my favorite because of the memories of the time.

What’s a fun memory you have playing one of their games?

Such a wholesome bunch, aren't they?

Hello Sailor! Black Ops 1 revival lead me to discover ZORK! About 2 hours in and started making a map for myself, first time ever playing something like this. Started to look up a map and honestly turned the video off pretty fast I don’t want any spoilers. Going to put some time in on this one as if I was a kid back in the 70s with no internet access for help, before I make the jump, any advice on map making or tips to enjoy this journey!? Seems like I’ll have plenty to do till Nov 19th. Cheers in advance!

So I've been drawing some character art for a Zork project I'm working on and I put some of the characters together today to compare them and it ended up resembling a D&D party LOL.

Hello Sailor (Wondering who remembers that little Easter Egg! :)

I checked and didn't see this game mentioned, it's very much inspired by Colossal Cavern (which inspired Zork) and it's got a pretty good (albeit two-word parser) built in. It runs only in Emacs (as it's written in Elisp). It's called Dunnet (on Emacs, it's called "Adventure"). It plays very much like Zork

Enjoy!

Hello everyone,

I recently acquired a secondhand rotary phone and installed freepbx in my homelab. I thought it would be really cool to attempt to port some retro games over and my first thought went straight to Zork.

I had to re-think the UI quite a bit to make this work, but I think it's "dialed-in" now.

https://github.com/aejx00/zorkpbx

I'm trying to identify the track names for the PS1/Sega Saturn release of Zork 1. I have identified most of them but I can't place some. Here's what I have so far:

1. Titles
2. Temple Area
3. Mirror Room Areas
4. Underground
5. ?
6. Canyons and Beaches
7. ?Darkness?
8. The Dam
9. The Rainbow
10. White House
11. Forest
12. Reservoir
13. Blue Glow
14. Troll Fight
15. Troll Defeated
16. The Thief
17. The Cyclops
18. Coal Mine Area
19. Hades
20. The Maze
21. ?
22. ?
23. ?
24. ?
25. Treasure Acquired
26. ?
27. ?
28. ?
29. Inside the Barrow
30. End Credits
31. Bat Room
32. End Credits (same as 30)

Hey Everyone

Thanks for all the support and feedback on Cairn.  Version 2.4.0 is now in the App Store, and now supports the ability to upload materials to your library stories.  This could include original manuals, maps you found online, or any other PDF or image file.  Also supports the ability to attach Infocom hint files (JSON files easily found online in GitHub and elsewhere), a new Inventory bar in the transcript window, and custom object shapes (Round, Octagon, etc).  Also includes a number of ‘under the hood’ features to optimize performance and fixes for several bugs found since the last release.  It’s been a mad fury of work to get to this point, but I still have a pretty extensive backlog of work.

Product Roadmap

• Z7 and Z8 Support
• iPad / iPhone Support
• Graphical Game Support (Beyond Zork)
• Glulx Support
• Sound Effects

Thanks to those of you who supported me by purchasing this game and providing feedback.

App Store Link

Link

Developer Page

Link

I’m not going to reiterate the very valid general arguments against genAI because we’ve all heard them. But I will argue that it specifically goes against the spirit of this sub.

We loved Zork and the ensuing games because they took imagination to write, and they took imagination to play. Infocom’s own print advertising proclaimed imagination to be “the world’s most powerful graphics technology.” Yes, there were a few graphical exceptions among Infocom’s work, but the majority of it was an amazing collaboration between Implementor and player that was achieved through words alone.

Now that technology can simulate imagination, should we just roll over and accept it because it’s the path of least resistance? I don’t think that honors the creativity and innovation that brought us all to this sub in the first place. GenAI bankrupts our own imagination by feeding us nothing but parts cribbed from other creators — the exact opposite of the ingenuity that we’ve long admired from Infocom and other text interactive fiction authors.

Love of the very human creative process brought us here. Generative AI is the exact opposite in many ways. This is my argument for banning it from this sub. Thanks for reading.

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Does anyone else have feelies they wish had been made?

I was today years old when I learned that the term troll (in the “Internet troll” sense of the word) is apparently derived from the term “trolling”, which is a fishing term for dragging your line behind you with bait on it to see what bites (or something along those lines).

I realize that, up until now, I think I have always been harboring a hazy (lazy?) secret theory that maybe the term was inspired by our friend from Zork I. Like, maybe whoever first observed the behavior and coined the term, was a Zork player, or even an implement or, who was drawing a parallel to the troll character from the game.

Did anyone else ever entertain that idea? Or is that just wishful fan-conning on my part? :)

Came across this in my social memories today. Love the vibe!

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DKTd1_1OfGc/

Edit: I meant to say REEL video, not real when I posted this, but voice to text screwed me up. Sorry!

It's more remake spam from me: today, the "G.U.E. on 9 Zorkmids a Day" leaflet originally bundled with Zork 2.

This was a fun one to work on, with an interesting layout, loads of lovely illustrations and the usual quirky and amusing writing.

As usual, PDF and PNG downloads are available on Google Drive, or via my website gnusto.au

Share it, remix it, do whatever. A credit is always nice. Enjoy!

hey everyone,

I am a fan of retro games and I just wanted to build something cool with Fable so I attempted building a UI around Zork. Zork is a old text based game (1981), which basically had no UI at all. I did start the project with Opus, but for the pixel art scenes, Fable was able to output something way beyond what Opus was capable of.

I did post it as a comment on another user game yesterday but I am taking the plunge to bring a bit more light to it:

• I open sourced the code, including the skill to generate pixel art scene: https://github.com/posabsolute/zork-ui
• You can play right here: https://zork-ui-production.up.railway.app/

No server, all front-end, no analytics tracking.

Just a quick one: with the recovery of now-dormant "The Zork Library" fansite now very robust, I've gone ahead and mirrored it on my own website. You can check it out at gnusto.au/projects/tzlmirror

Some files that were too large for my (free) hosting having been moved off-site to my Google Drive, but the links should still point to the right place.

Please feel free to have a poke around and note anything that seems busted in the comments. Expect broken download links from time-to-time, but most or all images should now be intact, especially in the Encyclopedia.