New Zork Times, The, v3(2)

~1 minute read

Apr-Jun 1984

Infocom Scoreboard

Did you know that Zork I has more rooms and takeable objects than any other Infocom game, yet is one of the smallest in size? Were you aware that Sorcerer is not only the largest game, but also the most dangerous?

The following chart shows some interesting statistics about the first eleven Infocom games. The first column shows the number of rooms in each game as far as the game's own internal programming is concerned. This sometimes differs with the apparent number of rooms (second column). For example, the Royal Puzzle in Zork III seems like 31 rooms, but internally it's actually just one room. The Desert in Infidel™ seems infinite, but it's actually just 10 rooms. And in several games, for various arcane reasons, there are rooms that can never be entered.

The third column lists the number of different ways to die in each game. For Suspended™, this refers to the number of different ways that you (the person in the cylinder) can be killed, not the individual robots. The fourth column tells the number of words in each game's vocabulary -— that is, the words that the game will understand in your inputs without saying "I don't know that word." The fifth column shows the size of each game (most recent release) in bytes.

The last column shows the number of takeable objects in each game. This figure is occasionally misleading: for example, the raft in Zork I is actually three different takeable objects (inflated, uninflated, and punctured).

This article appeared in
New Zork Times, The
Apr-Jun 1984

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