🧭 THE ARCHIVES

Quote of the day

A ghost appears in the room and is appalled at your desecration of the remains of a fellow adventurer. He casts a curse on your valuables and banishes them to the Land of the Living Dead. The ghost leaves, muttering obscenities.

-- Zork I

Factoid of the day

In Sorcer, the GOLMAC spell lets you travel backwards through time. The name GOLMAC is a portmanteau of "Gold Machine." In Zork III the Temporizer, which lets you travel backwards in time, is described as a "gold machine."

*Just when you thought it was safe to go back underground again.*
Nov 1981

PC Magazine, v1(6)

~1 minute read

Oct 1982

P-Communiques

Cave Games

Some of us at PCommuniques really enjoy cave games and other underground adventures. We were delighted when Zork I and II became available for the PC, but a reader notified us of a bug in Zork I and the simple fix for that problem. It seems that when Zork is run with a color/graphics card and a green phosphor or black and white monitor, it displays text that is virtually unreadable in the 80-column mode and barely readable in the 40-column mode. Infocom, the distributor of Zork, supplied this solution for the problem; the fix will also solve any similar problem with Zork II or the mystery game Deadline.

When you boot the game, listen for the system's beep. As soon as you hear it, type the digit 8. The booting will stop and the letter "U" will appear in the upper left corner of the screen. When you see the "U," type in 70 with no spaces and no carriage return. After typing 70 (the digits will appear on the screen next to the "U"). you will see the letter "N" on the lower left of the screen. Immediately type 07. Now you can play cave games, our anonymous reader says, "with text that looks like Sophia Loren."

This article appeared in
PC Magazine
Oct 1982

These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.