Question 1

True or false: The verb 'xyzzy' in Zork was originally a joke about a real computer command at MIT.

Accepted Answer

True. MIT hackers used 'xyzzy' as a magic word in various programs, and it became a famous cheat code in Zork to teleport between rooms.

Question 2

True or false: Zork’s infamous 'grue' was originally a typo that the developers decided to keep.

Accepted Answer

False. The grue was intentionally created as a monster that eats players in the dark, inspired by fantasy fiction; no typo myth is supported by records.

Question 3

True or false: The Great Underground Empire in Zork was inspired by the real-life Mammoth Cave system.

Accepted Answer

False. The developers based the setting on their Dungeons & Dragons campaigns and general fantasy tropes, not any specific real cave system.

Question 4

True or false: Zork was originally written in a programming language called MDL, not BASIC or C.

Accepted Answer

True. MDL (Model Development Language) was used at MIT for early text adventures. Zork’s source code was later ported to Fortran and C for commercial release.

Question 5

True or false: Zork was one of the first video games to sell over a million copies commercially.

Accepted Answer

True. By 1986, Zork I alone had sold over 800,000 copies, and the trilogy surpassed a million, making it a landmark hit for text adventures.

Question 6

True or false: The word 'Zork' was a nonsense term used by MIT hackers with no special meaning.

Accepted Answer

True. It started as a slang term at MIT for an unfinished program. The Infocom founders kept it because they liked the sound, despite marketing concerns.

Question 7

True or false: Zork was originally a single-player game with no multiplayer options ever released.

Accepted Answer

False. Infocom released 'Zork: The Undiscovered Underground' as a multiplayer version for an event, and later fan projects added multiplayer, but the original was single-player.

Question 8

True or false: The first version of Zork was written on a PDP-10 mainframe with only 512K of memory.

Accepted Answer

False. It ran on a PDP-10 with 512 kilowords (about 1 megabyte) of memory, not 512 kilobytes, which was massive for its time.

Zork Trivia Questions