It’s an old game.
I saved by typing “save”, but how do I load it? It says it doesn’t know the world load and open is an in game command.
I’m pretty sure it’s restore.
I remember playing that game years ago and I think the command MIGHT simply be LOAD though it’s been too long to remember. 
I’m pretty sure it’s RESTORE as well. Man, it’s been ages since I played any Zork.
Keep a light source handy, and watch out for thieves!
ZORK . . . what a great game. Rocked my world back in 1979.
Amusing results when you do the following: say “xyzygy” and
jump
Zork knows a lot of verbs, just play around and see what happens.
Remember you can us abbreviations: u=up d=down w=west z=wait g=again (repeats last command). The shortest word for your light source is “lamp” vs. lantern.
FYI, I’m 90% certain it’s Restore
oh, yeah, some other stuff I just remembered. If you want the room to be described every time you enter it, type VERBOSE. If you never want to see the room description, type SUPERBRIEF. The “standard” setting – getting the room description the first time you enter it – is called BRIEF.
tanstaffl – what’s up with the Zork link? It’s definitely different than the game I played.
I found Raamses’ coffin but the sceptre wasn’t inside. What the hey? Also, I didn’t encounter the enraged dwarf at the foot of the trap door, perhaps that was just luck? Or the thief in the labyrinth, now that I think of it. I found an item I didn’t remember: a coil of wire.
Hello Again, I think you mean xyzzy, which is an Easter Egg in nearly every interactive fiction game there is.
If you’re playing old interactive fiction games for nostalgia’s sake, may I recommend looking at the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition which is happening right this very moment? Thirty games have been entered this year – I haven’t played any of them yet, but I do every year (and entered a game last year). Some of them will be absolutely abhorrent, but each year there are four or five games that, in my opinion, are superior to anything that Infocom put out.
Anyone can play, anyone can judge, anyone can enter.
Now, to get back to working on the entry I intended for this year but never finished…
dag, lno you’re right. The history of xyzzy, as I understand it, is that it was a magic word in one of the first popular text adventures, called IIRC “Adventure.” I found a copy on Compuserve back in the 80s and, jmho, of course, Zork I has several sections that are freely um… “inspired” by Adventure.
Hey, lno, what was the game you entered in the IFComp last year? Is it still available online? I’d love to play it.
And yes, still replaying the occasional Infocom game, I can confirm that it’s ‘restore’ to load a game.
The game I entered was Jane, Anamorphic. The linked file is a .z5 file, which you need to run through a Z-Code interpreter program.
If you’re on Windows, then WinFrotz is one of the most popular interpreters. For Mac OS X 10.1.2 or higher, there’s a Mac version.
Jane was my first attempt at writing interactive fiction, and the source code is horribly, horribly ugly. It’s also somewhat non-traditional, so don’t expect the “gather treasures and solve puzzles” style of game. It also had one of the greatest standard deviations in its scoring - people either loved it or hated it.
I came in tenth in a field of thirty-eight – not bad for a rookie, I tell myself.
Thanks for the link, lno. I do already have Zoom, a Z-code interpreter for Mac OSX, and it loads it just fine. I’ll try to start playing it later today, if I get a chance. Congrats on coming in 10th… sounds great even not considering it was your first try. And the ‘non-traditional’ part sounds to me like a plus…
Hey, sounds like you’re already pretty familiar with IF. I hope you enjoy it - if you’ve got any questions or comments on it, feel free to drop me a line at the email in my profile.
I just want to tell everyone that I have all three original Zork games on my Palm Pilot.
Thank you.
That link (which is actually someone’s 404 page, btw) is an implementation of the original Zork. It predates Infocom. When Blank and Lebling went on to found Infocom they wanted to publish Zork but it was too big for the computers of the day. So, they split the original in two. Some things got moved around and put in one or the other (to fit in with the “collect treasures” objective of the first and the “defeat the dungeon master” objective of the second). So, everything is not in the same place as the Infocom versions. (You may have discovered that the map is somewhat different too and that the parser is not as robust as the later Infocom one.) Think of it as an earlier draft.
Ino - Is the IF Competition still around? I played around with Inform for a while and wrote one game (The Awakening which is still probably somewhere in the IF Archive. It was my first attempt and it looks and plays like one. 
) but never entered anything in the Competition. (Tried to write one once but never finished.) I’ve been out of touch with the IF community for several years and didn’t know it was still around.
And, I have Frotz for my Palm too. And about a dozen games (that I really plan to finish someday :))
Hello Sailor! Where did you find such a thing?
Dunno about Smeghead, but I bought all of Activisions’ “Infocom Classics” CDs a few years back, for $5 a pop. After copying the Z-Code files onto my iMac and getting a copy of Frotz, I’ve now got the entire Infocom game library at my fingertips. 
Still around and going strong (or as strong as the miniscule community can be). rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction are the two newsgroups dedicated to it, and the Competition has continued unabated - check ifcomp.org for the status on this year’s and all future. I believe the judging period ends on November 15th, so download the current entries and give them a try!
(And it’s lno, not Ino!)