West of the House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded
front door.
There is a mailbox here.
The original Zork, considered by many to be the forebear of all computer adventure games, began with nothing more than these few lines of descriptive text on a blank computer scene. No graphics, no music, no sound effects: when you played Zork, all of those sensual details were up to you. You had to imagine the scene before you, visualizing the objects, doorways, and obstacles in a given situation and then - placing yourself in that situation - you had to figure out what to do next.
Once you decided on a course of action, you had to type your instructions into the text parser - the only interface available. "open Door," you might say. "Enter Door. Go West. Examine Bathroom."
It was a far cry from today's slick, icon-based interfaces and knockout graphics. But, at the risk of sounding like Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man, we liked it that way. The fun of Zork was comparable to the pleasure of a good novel. You could envision the scene, personalize it, make it your own. And even better than a novel, you could interact with the scenes and everything in them. You had a real cause and effect power over a fictional world. "get Knife. Attack Grue."
Now, thanks to the talented folks at Activision, we'll get to once again explore the Great Underground Empire of Zork. The brand new Return to Zork not only revives a classic adventure cycle, but catapults it from the text-only beginnings of adventure gaming into the future of interactive entertainment. Best of all, RTZ has made the amazing leap from past to future with the grace, humor, and fully realized game world we've come to expect of the name Zork.
Eddie Dombrower, the producer of Return to Zork, says that the goal from the very beginning of the project (over a year and a half ago!) was not simply to create a new Zork game, or even to make a modern-style graphic adventure set in the Zork universe. The designers hoped to actually advance the state of computer gaming, from the way the game environment to the graphics and sounds which bring that environment to life. And they wanted it to be fun. "we're adventure game players," Dombrower said of the RTZ design team. "As a rule, you always try to build a game that you'd want to play."
The first step was to create a unique interface that, although entirely graphical, allowed the creative freedom of the text parser while avoiding some of the problems in existing graphical interfaces. Many graphical interfaces, Dombrower explains, actually make the game too easy. "You don't really have to interact with a scene. You just have to discover what's in it."
A typical adventure game, for instance, might have you sweep your cursor about the screen, and the cursor would turn into a hand icon indicating you'd found a sword you can pick up. You might then click the sword on a bad guy to attack him. But in RTZ, you have to decide how you'll pick it up. Will you hold it, or transfer it immediately into your inventory? And when you use the sword on an enemy, you're presented with a number of different ways to use it. Will you slash from left or right, thrust forward, strike the enemy with the blade, or swing down at his head?
The RTZ system quickly becomes second-nature, even though it presents you with more choices and a grater degree of control over the objects in your inventory than other types of interfaces. You'll forget there's anything extraordinary about it - and that's the true beauty of its design.
But it's the look of Return to Zork, and the sheer professionalism of its presentation, that will command your admiration each time you sit down to play. Utilizing the digitized video and audio of professional actors in nearly every role, RTZ comes closer to being an interactive movie than any game we've seen.
Of course you're thinking, "Yeah, sure, I've heard that before." But in truth, no game so far has really deserved the appellation. While there have been plenty of beautiful cinematic sequences within games, these aren't interactive. And though digitized characters have also been used in games, they're usually framed with icon bars and inventories, in effect functioning as game pieces. The experience is similar to reaching into a box and manipulating dolls - including a pre-designed little doll of the character you're playing.
Return to Zork is different. From start to finish, your viewpoint is the only one that's important. You, the player, are the character moving through the game, and you see every building, object, and person from a first-person perspective. There are no framing icons, no borders around the screen to remind you that you're looking into a computer monitor. You are the star of RTZ, and you'll live this game through your eyes and your ears.
Ears, because not a single written line of dialog appears in this game. When you talk with anyone, or when you're told important information, it's entirely through digitized speech. If you don't have a sound card, you'll need one! To help you remember what's been said, you can access a tape recorder in your inventory that automatically records all dialog. It's a wonderful extension of the first-person perspective, and it works beautifully.
Dombrower explains that a lot of thought went into the decision to use a first-person view. "One of the reasons we made this a first person game is that text games are first-person. They don't describe your character as a rule," Dombrower says. "you aren't a hero, unlike third-person point-of-view games where you see your character, and there's a gender, race, status associated with the person you're playing as."
While the feeling of playing Return to Zork as yourself will be a familiar one to Zork veterans, the setting of the game won't. RTZ is set 700 years after the last text adventure, so the world has changed quite a bit.
This break with the familiar was intentional. Because fans of the text adventures are used to painting the world of Zork in their own minds, the Activision team knew that no visual representation of that world could satisfy everyone. "I didn't want to try to bring something from people's minds to the screen," Dombrower explained. "These fans are a very, very loyal group, and trying to draw things they've imagined for years didn't seem appropriate."
In fact, Dombrower compares the process of bringing the world of Zork into visual terms to translating a popular novel to the screen: no matter how you work it, someone's bound to be disappointed. But the Activision team seems to have conquered this problem, first by placing the new game far in the future, and most importantly by using professional actors, directors, and screenwriters to propel Return to Zork into a new level of computer entertainment.
Dombrower and the RTZ development team are among the first computer game designers to realize that once computer games move into the realm of acting, dialog, and photo-realism, they are no longer competing against other computer games. They are going head-to-head with television and movies.
When we see live human actors in a game, it's only natural to expect acting on a par with at least what you'd see in an average TV sitcom. But when you're presented with stiff, unbelievable, and amateurish performances like those throughout The Seventh Guest, the bad acting quickly overwhelms the technological achievement of bringing live action to the computer. It becomes all too easy to say "If I want to see acting, I'll watch TV. If I want to play a computer game, I'll play one without these hambone performances!"
But when instead we see and hear acting of the high caliber presented in Return to Zork we're able to throw ourselves into the experience and truly feel that we're playing an interactive movie rather than an interactive high school play. Because the production values are so high in RTZ, you'll find yourself drawn into the game's storyline immediately, never having to overlook flawed performances.
Until now, the much-heralded "marriage" of Hollywood and computer entertainment has seemed to be just so much hype. But Return to Zork actually brings the hype to life. This is truly an amazing, next-generation product, of such unparalleled quality and technical excellence that it must become the model for all tomorrow's designers.
Zork is back, to lead us into the future. Again.
Thanks to Warwick Annear for transcribing and donating this article.