Zork II: A Critique of Idolatry Then and Now
This post spoils two puzzles in Zork II. Turn back if you want to try these “bad” puzzles for yourself!
There are two puzzles in Zork II that are widely considered the “worst” in the Infocom canon. Thanks to Graham Nelson’s widely-read “The Craft of the Adventure,” they have become totemic manifestations of craft failure. People who have never played Zork II have heard of these puzzles, violating as they do Nelson’s “Bill of Player’s Rights.” The infamous Bank of Zork puzzle is the shame-faced mascot of right number thirteen: “To be able to understand a problem once it is solved” (10). The universally reviled “baseball” puzzle has come to represent an oddly specific prohibition: “Not to need to be American” (11).
Sometimes, a piece of criticism is so elegantly reasonable that it comes to dominate discussions. This is often a positive thing. It can afford other writers new and interesting points of departure and revive what may have previously seemed exhausted lines of inquiry. In other unfortunate cases, a readership considers the “case closed.” The original criticism becomes such a commonplace that it will be mentioned, sometimes uncited, as if nothing more needs to be said. The spirit of the critique is lost, reduced to a prop or mantra, or perhaps to a ritual of critical dismissal. These are mistakes that readers can make; they are misunderstandings.
I find it curious that it is hard to locate something other than mechanical analysis of these puzzles. It may seem that, given their places of (dis)honor in a foundational work of IF criticism, there is no longer anything to say. I believe that there is a spirit of reverence that has interfered with both creation and interpretation of these puzzles. In other words, a kind of idolatry has been at work.
Case #1: Idolatry of Legacy (Internal)
The Bank of Zork is a location in Zork II. Not surprisingly, there are two things of value found within that can be given to the demon (see the last post for background). One, a painting of “J. Pierpoint Flathead,” is easily found hanging in the bank chairman’s office. The second, “200 neatly stacked zorkmid bills,” is harder to attain.
As the map suggests, the goal is to reach the inner vault. The thick line above the Safety Depository is a prominent feature and presumably central to a puzzle of some sort:
The northern "wall" of the room is a shimmering curtain of light.The player, after some experimentation, is likely to “walk through curtain.” What happens next will depend upon the direction from which the player entered the Safety Depository.
- If the Adventurer enters from the West Teller’s room, he will wind up in the West Viewing Room.
- If he does so from the East Teller’s Room, then he will find him in the East Viewing Room.
- If he enters from the Chairman’s office, he will arrive in the Small Room.
- Finally, if he enters from the Small Room, then he will reach the vault and its prize, the Zorkmids.
While this seems fairly straightforward, there are a number of problems:
- There is no precedent for determining traversal outcomes based on point of entry, and there are not enough clues to signal this distinction to the player.
- The puzzle makes no in-game sense. A bank employee wouldn’t enter the chairman’s office whenever they needed to access the vault.
- There is no curtain of light in the safety depository, so there is no reason for the player to walk through an ordinary wall (the in-game rule has already been established that curtain of light=teleporter).
If anecdotal evidence is to believed, most players who got the bills didn’t understand how or why they did. They simply kept entering and exiting until they stumbled across the treasure. I’m one of those people, so I can confirm that, at least in my case, The Bank of Zork is clearly guilty of violating right number thirteen, here explained in detail by Nelson:
This may sound odd, but many problems are solved by accident or trial and error. A guard-post which can be passed if and only if you are carrying a spear, for instance, ought to indicate somehow that this is why you’re allowed past. (The most extreme example must be the notorious Bank of Zork, of which I’ve never even understood other people’s explanations.) (10)
And yes, one could leave it at that, call the Bank of Zork a failure of craft and move on. I would argue that this–especially in our age of readily available hints and solutions–is the least of its problems. Some sins are sins of philosophy rather than method.
The above video is worthwhile in its entirety, but beginning at the 35-minute mark Marc Blank and Dave Lebling each talk about the Bank of Zork puzzle. It begins with Blank attempting to explain what the puzzle is about (a failed attempt, I think). Lebling then talks about porting it. Lebling indicates that the game testers didn’t understand it, and then admits that he couldn’t explain it to them. He then led them to Blank, who couldn’t really explain it either. Even though the testers didn’t get it, the Bank of Zork Puzzle went in unchanged.
This is idolatry of legacy, and it is the chief shortcoming of Zorks II and III. On multiple occasions, obviously flawed parts of Dungeon were ported straight into the commercial releases. Even when legitimate concerns were raised, these areas and puzzles were left as-is. Was Dungeon a sacred text? Did Lebling feel he could not change another’s work (the same goes for Blank and Zork III)? For that matter: did anyone think the Carousel Room was fun in 1981?
The Bank of Zork is a low point for the Zork trilogy because everybody knew that it was bad as-is, and nobody did anything about it. I hereby find Infocom guilty of idolatry–Dungeon was certainly not above reproach as game or text. Behind most poor craft decisions is a philosophy (or its absence), and The Bank of Zork is no exception.
Case #2: Interpretive Idolatry (External)
I’ll get this out of the way: yes, the “Baseball” puzzle is bad, and it is bad in multiple senses. In the first sense, it does require specific cultural knowledge that is hard to uncover via simple research. Rather humorously, Nelson’s specific prohibition is against a player needing “to be an American.” Here is his more detailed elaboration:
The diamond maze in `Zork II’ being a case in point. Similarly, it’s polite to allow the player to type English or American spellings or idiom. For instance `Trinity’ endears itself to English players in that the soccer ball can be called “football” – soccer is a word almost never used in England. (11)
Without getting too far afield (heh), this is a complicated problem. I think that since most narratives are about people, cultural specificity is worthwhile and potentially enriching. In 2021, what I think players are really entitled to is a good, clean google search. If the information can be found easily, then it is fair play. In Zork II‘s case, however, it still doesn’t get a pass. Searching for “babe club,” for instance, returns results for a band called “Babe Club.” Still, given America’s hegemonic powers in the world, it might be both unwise and easy for American authors to assume that parts of their experiences are universal when they may not be.
But what of the puzzle? It consists of something that really looks like a maze. A number of rooms, identically described, without specified exits:
This is a room with oddly angled walls and passages in all directions. The walls are made of some glassy substance.
On the floor is a very small diamond shaped window which is dimly glowing.
If the player moves in the correct direction, the “window” glows more brightly. However, the puzzle is hard to brute force because the correct moves must be made consecutively. One wrong turn and the Adventurer may need to begin again. Besides the diamond window, there is a clue that may or may not be helpful:
A long wooden club lies on the ground near the diamond-shaped window. The club is curiously burned at the thick end.
>get club
Taken.
>examine it
The words "Babe Flathead" are burned into the wood.American players may (not everyone here likes baseball) intuit that this is a baseball bat featuring a reference to legendary home-run hitter Babe Ruth. It’s a baseball puzzle, and some players will realize that the bat is at home plate. Unfortunately, what comes next is a bit messy. The first question is: where is first base? If the player can deduce that it lies to the southeast, they can circle the “bases” and reach the exit. Some problems:
- The player approaches home plate from the pitcher’s mound, rather than from a dugout. Batters don’t begin at the pitcher’s mound, ever. This makes the starting direction of southeast nonsensical.
- The fact that most home plates face east is not some sort of widespread “American” knowledge. I would wager that most Americans do not know this. I myself suffered (I was more of a
soccerfootball player) through years of little league and never knew this. - Pre-internet, where would someone have gotten this knowledge? Public library? Bookstore?
- Again, there are no clear indicators as to what a player should research in the first place if they don’t know baseball.
So. It’s a stinker, alright. But with that said, there really is a major difference between the Bank of Zork and the baseball puzzles, and it is philosophical in nature. If BoZ represents a sort of stubborn refusal to innovate, then the baseball puzzle is a noble–albeit failed–attempt to improve one of the worst elements of Zork I: its mazes. The oddly-angled rooms would prove to be the first of a long line of puzzles-disguised-as-mazes, a phenomenon that would prove to be one of Lebling’s standout contributions to the medium. From this initial failure would rise some of my favorite Infocom puzzles–the Unseen Horror from Enchanter, for instance. The baseball puzzle is a good move, poorly executed.
Perhaps we are occasionally guilty of interpretive idolatry, assuming that there is nothing left to consider beyond these puzzles’ isolate machinery. Because the mechanical is by its nature finite and concrete, it promises a sort of critical certainty rarely possible in textual analysis. Puzzles have clear boundaries and either “work” or do not. There is a mature notion of what is “fair” in a puzzle, and delineation of fairness is a worthwhile aim. However, good criticism is never a journey’s end. Rather, it is always a beginning. Considering player rights is a valid critical lens, not a critical preemption. Nor, I think, was it ever meant to be.
Zork II‘s Battle Between Infocom’s Past and Future
In the case of these two “worst puzzles” from Zork II, one reveals the truly unpleasant implications of authorial ambiguity–it is odd to see Lebling apologizing for the Bank of Zork, for instance. He didn’t write it, and it isn’t entirely clear whether he had the power to change it. There are numerous, smaller issues in Zork II that beg the question–why couldn’t this have been made better? The verb-guessing with the robot, for instance: why did that stay? Does the carousel room have any purpose beyond jerking people around? etc. Much has been said about the Bank of Zork, it’s hidden springs and catches, its inadequate hints, etc., but little has been said about what its presence in Zork II says about Infocom’s attitude toward Zork in 1981. More significant, there isn’t a lot of discussion about this attitude’s implications for Zork III.
The opposite is true for the baseball puzzle. There is no question of who “owned” the material. Lebling could do and did do as he wanted. It has serious mechanical issues, even if the player knows which direction baseball diamonds face. My young self knew instantly that the “maze” was a baseball diamond, but I couldn’t figure out where first base was. If I remember correctly, I thought that it would be to the northwest, since the “dugout” seemed to be to the east. Still: I believe that this is the best sort of failure, motivated as it was by a desire to improve upon a truly unpleasant part of Zork I. It is inevitable that artists make mistakes, but it is best that they make new ones. I for one would have been far more bothered by yet another “maze of twisty little passages.”
In the next post, I will hopefully tie up the many critical strands of Zork II: The Wizard as the last surviving member of a technocratic elite, the disruptive presence of the Adventurer, and the implications of a demonic bargain. Stay tuned for the conclusion of my assessment of Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz!
There is one more clue to the diamond maze. If you walk around in it long enough, you’re likely to see a message like:
As you thrash about in the maze, the mirthful voice of the Wizard taunts you: “Fool! You’ll never get past second base at this rate!”
Which base he refers to seems to depend on which base you’ve reached in the maze. I know very little about baseball beyond what I’ve learned from the Peanuts comic strip, so to me this isn’t a helpful hint either.
It is perhaps interesting to note that when the Infocom source code got leaked to the Internet, it included an almost completed version of Mini-Zork II. A stripped down version of the game, similar to how Zork I was stripped down to run on a C64 without a floppy drive. In this version, both the Bank of Zork and the diamond maze have been completely removed.
I’m not sure why it was never released. Possibly it was still too large to fit entirely into the memory of a C64? For fun, I spent some time fixing the bugs that I could find and understand (including some that are still in the full game) and making the resulting file smaller. If anyone would like to see what might have been, the result can be found at https://github.com/eriktorbjorn/minizork2-renovated
The mini-Zork stuff is an interesting rabbit hole. Thanks for pointing me in that direction. I’ve been focusing exclusively on commercial releases, so I have seen these at Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog but have never clicked.
A C64 tape project is curious for a few reasons. I don’t think tape drives had a big install footprint in the US–perhaps it was different in the UK? As far as I can recall, tape drives were primarily used with the VIC 20–software stores almost exclusively carried 1541 diskettes.
I think file size limits were fairly generous for tape programs. I do wonder what the implications would be for Infocom’s use of game diskettes for a homebrew virtual memory file. Here’s a discussion about tape limitations: https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=64959&%3Bstart=15
Anyway, thanks for the link. I’ll be sure to check it out.
“If he enters from the Chairman’s office, he will arrive in the Safety Depository.
Finally, if he enters from the Safety Depository, then he will reach the vault and its prize, the Zorkmids.”
I think in both these sentences, “Safety Depository” should read “Small Room”.
Yep, you’re right. Fixed!
I’ve got a full post just about the baseball maze thing, where I explain that you can solve it without knowing about baseball so it isn’t _quite_ as bad as usually advertised. Certainly the knowledge isn’t “required”.
https://bluerenga.blog/2020/02/25/zork-ii-infamous/
dmstelzer’s comment about how the randomization works is also worth reading.
I saw that (I’ve read & enjoyed all of your Infocom stuff). I think you’re right, and it’s as viable as the “baseball” answer. However I think the randomization keeps it from being a better alternative. I guess there’s a general theme in Zork II of establishing and violating covenants (curtains aren’t the only thing that can be walked through, a wall will remain from turn to turn, etc). Mechanically it’s a bust but perhaps a sign of better things to come.
As I understand it, Mini-Zork I was released commercially. I have seen pictures that were supposedly of the packaging, and I remember seeing a short review of it in a computer magazine. Though all I recall beyond a brief description was that it pointed out how strange it was to play an Infocom game on the C64 and have it respond to your commands almost immediately.
To run from tape the entire data file and interpreter has to fit in memory. With the Ozmoo interpreter, that means the file can’t be larger than 50-52 KB: https://github.com/johanberntsson/ozmoo
Which probably means that you have to cut at least a third from the full game for it to fit.
I forgot to say that the leaked version of Mini-Zork II is not completable. The carousel room has a good chance of crashing modern interpreters, some map connections are wrong, and the balloon is too bugged to work at all. The modified version I linked to is completable and is hopefully a fair representation of what might have been.
I wonder if a Mini-Zork III was ever considered. It seems like a game that would be a bit harder to cut things from.
I think Zork III would depend on the developer’s philosophy. The new parts by Marc Blank feel like a different game compared with the parts from Dungeon. It would be interesting to hear how individual Implementers would approach it
Some commentary here from my personal experience playing Zork II in the 1980s:
— The Carousel Room actually was kind of fun. It forced a somewhat different mapping approach — your mapping is a bit disconnected until you figure out how to stop the carousel — with a real feel of exploration and danger. Also, this forced exploration (assuming you were doing your own mapping) increased your chances of dying and *learning about the demon*. So it all fits.
— The Bank of Zork puzzle had even MORE implementation problems (failures of craft) than previously mentioned. At least in the original v7 (I just retested this), you had to “walk through curtain”. You couldn’t just type “north”. Frankly, I might have had a chance to solve the puzzle if “north” had worked, but “north” blocked your action, saying “There is a curtain of light there.”
This very serious implementation issue, pointing the player away from the solution, meant that it took me a very long time to even consider that I could walk through the curtain, let alone trying to walk through an ordinary wall. I started treating the curtain as an object in the room and attempting to manipulate it, *as the game had led me to do*. If “north” had worked, and likewise, if “south” had worked from the Small Room, then there would have been a chance. I do wonder if the puzzle would have been considered fair if those changes were made (although it still makes no story sense).
Note: there’s an error in your text — “There is no curtain of light in the safety depository, ” you mean “There is no curtain of light in the Small Room…”
At some point cumulative failures of craft render anything terrible. Infocom was famous for careful crafting, but this was an exception of an extreme degree.
— The baseball puzzle was completely incomprehensible to me as an American even AFTER I figured out that it was a baseball bat. I swung the bat, that’s great. The window is a “diamond”, which is another baseball clue. I even figured out that maybe you were supposed to walk in certain directions, from the light. With the baseball clue, I eventually even maybe you should run around a diamond, so I tried E. N. W. S. When that didn’t work, I abandoned the “running the bases” theory.
The fact that the puzzle assumed that the diamond was oriented in a particular way to the compass (!!!!!!!), which is perhaps the official preferred orientation but is certainly not the orientation of many baseball diamonds, is far, far, far too obscure and arguably simply incorrect. They *could* have implemented it to work with a baseball diamond in any orientation; ZIL certainly has the ability. I really don’t know what Blank & Lebling were thinking there, and apparently neither do they.
This goes to show that one overly-rigid implementation decision can break a puzzle even from within the puzzle’s own paradigm — which I think is also a lesson from the Bank of Zork puzzle.
— The other puzzle in Zork II which I found completely incomprehensible even after the fact was the well puzzle. This isn’t usually listed with the other two, but it made very little sense to me, especially since there was not much in the way of hints that this was a well, or why a well had been built which was dry at the bottom. The eroded letters at the bottom were no help.
Again, there are ways this puzzle could have been redesigned — if there was some indication that the bottom *used to be* flooded but wasn’t any more due to a redirected stream, or something — which effectively happens in the aqueduct scenes in Zork III, so the Implementers figured out how to do stuff like this not much later. But not in Zork II.
— The interlaced puzzle dependency was an extreme frustration in Zork II. At any given time, you could see a dozen puzzles, but most of them could only be solved with items you couldn’t access yet. Some degree of this is acceptable, but I’ve never seen it to such an extreme degree as Zork II; it appears to be open-world with modular puzzles, but then it actually *isn’t* because the puzzles have to be done in a surprisingly rigid order, a fact which the game does not hint at at all. In contrast, Zork I was pretty open in terms of what order you solved the puzzles in, so the change is unexpected. In later games, Infocom would more often cue the player to whether the puzzles could be solved independently or “not yet”.
Worse yet, many of the puzzles which can be solved independently at the beginning are the worst: the bank, the baseball diamond, and the well. 🙁
— The robot puzzle was again one which could perhaps have been implemented in a way which made it fun — if Infocom had devised the “PERSON, DO THING” parser, which they hadn’t yet.
— In general, I think the most frustrating parts of Zork II suffered from sparseness of implementation, leading to the puzzles not being properly hinted. Meanwhile, the memorable parts are the ones with lots of local color hinting for the player, such as the Demon or the unicorn. Lebling and Blank appeared to learn from this for Zork III, which has far more local color, and where puzzle order dependency is always hinted by the game in some way.
The carousel would be better if you could deal with it quickly once solved, but Zork II feels quite strict with lamp batteries, so random events like this (and the Wizard’s magic, too) can feel quite tedious, even if you know all of the solutions to the game.
I think one of the reasons that riddles have fallen out of favor in IF is because they are usually unclued and can favor some players over others for a number of reasons. It’s likely for the best.
I’m having a lot of fun reading your essays, just found this!
Both puzzles are bad, especially bad since Craft of Adventure came out, but the eighties were a particularly unforgiving time for players. From legendarily ridiculous ways to die in Sierra games to spending all of your quarters in less then a minute while playing Ghouls n’ Ghosts in the arcade, I believe we were taught frustration is there, and it comes in droves.
I didn’t mind the Carousel Room or the Well, to me they weren’t far from the norm of puzzles, Infocom did have some obscure stuff and definitely learning from death was a thing. I’m not against it per se.
Being brazilian, in the eighties (no internet), with just a glancing grasp of the language (it’s gotten better now) and the culture, the baseball puzzle was an accident for me. I recall finding out that the glow increased, and randomly tried out directions until something provided results. Years would pass until I truly understood what was going on, despite having some knowledge of who Babe Ruth was and that there were “bases” in baseball.
On the other hand, ironically the bank puzzle made complete sense to me at the time. Unfortunately though, that sense now eludes me completely, and I don’t have a clue on the mechanics of the puzzle, but I recall solving the puzzle based on a grasp of the mechanics.
Jason Dyer reported solving the baseball puzzle the same way, so there are at least two of you! My problem with the carousel was really about how Zork II wastes the lamp batteries. Lots of waiting for the Wizard’s effects to wear off and so forth. Of all the games in the trilogy, I really only ever worried about light in Zork II.
Glad you found the page! Hope you’ll stick around.
ISTR I first played Zork II on a classmate’s Apple II (because I had a PET and was Zorkless for several years). The two of us teaming up did manage to figure out the Bank and the Diamond puzzles. I remember it being somewhat obvious to us – I’m an American and he’s from Scotland but essentially grew up in the States – but the part that eluded us for the longest time was the orientation of the bases (I certainly had no idea until I read this post that there was a preferred orientation, but we don’t have MLB in my town).
As for the Bank puzzle, I don’t remember how we figured it out, but I do remember struggling with it on my own when playing Dungeon (Bob Supnik’s port from MDL to FORTRAN) on a minicomputer at work. I think what’s mostly going on is that the puzzle establishes the whole “curtains of light on the north wall of an area will teleport you in a strict sequence” but to make it a puzzle (rather than just repeating the same enter command several times in succession, there’s a reversal/twist to the process – a two-steps-forward-with-one-step-back flow.
I think the existence of the Epicene Gnome of Zurich is an admission of how obscure the Vault mechanic is.