Legends of Zork

» see legendsofzork.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The first time I read the word Zork it was already a reference to something else. Infocom was gone by 1989 and I got a modem in 1998, so the text adventures were finished before I had any way to reach them. What arrived instead was the name, quoted by people writing about games, always with the assumption that you knew.

Legends of Zork opened on 1 April 2009 and was not a joke. Jolt Online Gaming, a Dublin outfit that ran browser games for a living, had the license and built a casual adventure around it. You were a traveling salesman for FrobozzCo International, recently made redundant, sent out into the Great Underground Empire to hit things for zorkmids. There were classes and levels, and the writing kept the deadpan corporate tone the original games used for their in-fiction paperwork.

The interesting part was the meter. A free account got thirty action points a day and each move in the world spent one, so the game was over for the evening after about ten minutes unless you bought more. This was the shape Kingdom of Loathing had already proven and the shape Facebook was about to run into the ground with energy bars and timers. Zork, of all licenses, is the one where you would expect the constraint to be your own vocabulary rather than a daily allowance.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it played ~

Everything happened in a browser with no client and no download, which in 2009 still counted as an argument. You picked a class, walked a map made of text and small illustrations, fought whatever the encounter table produced, and sold the loot. Progress was slow by design because the action points made it slow, and the paid currency existed to make it less slow.

Jolt's own catalog says what kind of company this was. Utopia Kingdoms, NationStates 2, Championship Manager: Rivals, Earth 2025. Long-running browser games with small teams and steady subscription trickle. Legends of Zork was the one with a famous name attached, which is why it is the one anybody remembers.

~ the week it got ~

The notice went up around 24 May 2011 and the game closed at noon BST on Tuesday 31 May. Jolt was honest about the reason in a way that companies usually are not: development work had been scarce for a while and nobody was going to build new content for it. There was no scandal and no lawsuit over the license, just a studio deciding that the thing was finished.

Players got no refunds worth speaking of and no way to keep anything. A browser game with server-side state has no offline version by definition. When the login page stopped answering, every character built over two years stopped existing at the same moment.

~ what happened next ~

Jolt moved to Facebook, where Utopia Kingdoms went next, which is exactly where the industry was going in 2011. It did not help. On 14 March 2012 the chief executive announced the company was closing at the end of that week, and Jolt Online Gaming shut on 16 March 2012, giving its remaining games about the same amount of warning it had given Legends of Zork.

The Zork name survived this the way it has survived everything. It was a mainframe game before it was a product, and it has been licensed out to whoever wanted it ever since. This was one of the licensees. The grue got a browser tab and a daily allowance, and then it got switched off on a Tuesday at lunchtime.

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