I never played the text adventure game called Zork. I still haven’t, but I plan to address this in the coming week. I’m just not too familiar with the stuff from the 70s and early 80s. Some of it seemed pretty goddamn boring, you know? Not the kind of thing that’d hold my interest. Games like Pong, Ms. Pac-Man, Asteroids, and Galaga—which I have haphazardly played while waiting for a sandwich or a beer at some bar—were just a bit too simplistic when compared to a game like Super Mario Bros. Hell, games like those are now homework for game design students on their way to more ambitious projects. There was just something about playing a video game story and exploring a world in an interactive way that was more appealing. To quote a game programmer whose love of video games began with SMB:

I realized when I played Super Mario Bros. that […] someone made up this little world for other people to experience and to see. You didn’t even have to be there! It was just magical… Magical technology.

They also lack the instant nostalgia that I acquired from memories of my dad hooking up the Nintendo for the first time, or my uncle completing all of Super Mario Bros. 2 on Christmas Eve. Even my favorite aunt playing SMB because I was too sick to get out of bed and reach the controller. In essence, those older games—while iconic—were before my time. To me they are as silent films and music produced before 1900. I don’t know if I’ll discover the video game equivalent of other late personal discoveries like Man with a Movie Camera orTocatta and Fugue in D Minor, but it begins somewhere. The research alone is worth the effort. A great discovery is the best one can hope for.

In the meantime I’ve been enjoying something called Zork: The Cavern of Doom. Not exactly my kind of writing, but it harkens back to a time in the 90s when choose-your-own-adventure books allowed us to explore non-linear storytelling. And, best of all, look at that GUI. It’s fuckin’ beautiful in its simplicity. A text adventure game for the modern age.