Question 1

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 2

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

Accepted Answer

False. The 'xyzzy' command in Zork was a direct reference to the magic word from the earlier game Colossal Cave Adventure, not a real computer command at MIT. It teleported players, just as in Adventure.

Question 3

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

Accepted Answer

False. Zork was a slang term among MIT hackers with specific meanings like 'unfinished program' or 'something silly,' so it did have a special meaning.

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

False. By 1986, the entire Zork trilogy had sold about 694,000 copies (378k for Zork I, 186k for II, 129k for III). Arcade games like Space Invaders had already sold millions years earlier.

Question 6

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 7

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

Accepted Answer

True. Zork is a classic text adventure series that has always been single-player. No official multiplayer version of Zork has ever been released by Infocom or Activision.

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. The first Zork ran on a PDP-10 with 512 kilowords (about 2.4 megabytes) of memory, not 512 kilobytes. That was massive for its time, so the 'only' is misleading.

Zork Trivia Questions