Mob Mods: Revisiting the Great Underground Empire

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I've been gaming for nearly three decades, but I do have some glaring omissions in my game résumé. One of these is the original Zork, which came out in 1980 (it's so old that some versions even ran on 8-inch floppy disks!).

Zork is one of the pillars of PC gaming: an interactive-fiction game where the nameless adventurer explores an underground labyrinth. It's spawned a series of games, including a browser-based offering from Activision that came out in April.

I'm finally going to experience Zork. And I hope that you'll experience it with me.

Amraphael created the Neverwinter Nights 2 mod Zork: Rediscovering the Great Underground Empire. It takes interactive fiction and the NWN2 formula and gives them a spin: It's a graphical adventure that dispenses with the usual Dungeons & Dragons staples of class-creation, stat-building, and hack-n-slash combat.

Zork_Falls

You need the NWN2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer to run the mod. I've yet to encounter a NWN2 mod like this, and I'm looking forward to exploring the Great Underground Empire.

I hope that you are, too -- and I hope that you'll write about it in the Mobfeed (or at least e-mail your impressions to me at jason.wilson@bitmob.com). I'd like to include the community's thoughts into my own observations next week.

And don't forget: Watch out for Grues!

Tags: Zork, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, Mob Mods, Neverwinter Nights 2

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Demian Linn

July 29, 2009

Crazy. Is there a text interface too? Zork is one of the first PC games I remember playing...maybe *the* first.

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Dan "Shoe" Hsu

EIGHT-inch floppies? I never heard of such a thing....

Jason Wilson

@Demian It's the standard NWN2 interface. @Shoe: http://tinyurl.com/np8ukb

Rob Savillo

So this plays more like [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Zork]Return to Zork[/url] than the original? By the way, want some rye?

Brett Bates

[quote][url]http://tinyurl.com/np8ukb[/url][/quote] How do we know that's not a normal-sized floppy being held by a really tiny woman?

Yeah, and she's inserting that floppy into the world's first portable phone.

Evan Campbell

I came across the crazy notion of making my own text adventure game and I wanted to see how it was done. Sure enough I ended up finding a browser based version of the original zork. I played it for about an hour and a half and it was seriously a lot of fun. I'll probably go back to it later this week!

Omar Yusuf

This looks fantastically well presented. I'm always astonished at what modding communities are capable of doing. I'm not a big fan of NWN though, so I don't have the game...or the expansion.

Alexander Case

July 30, 2009

[quote=Brett Bates]How do we know that's not a normal-sized floppy being held by a really tiny woman?[/quote] Nope, that's legit - I had an old Osborne portable computer in my garage that used floppies about that size - and since it had barely any memory, it actually had to load the OS off a boot disk first, before it could then load an program that you could use the OS on. However, since the computer only had space for 2 drives, if you wanted to actually [i]save[/i] the project you were working on, you had to do this bizarre disk shuffle to make sure your work got saved to the correct disk and not, say, the boot disk or the disk for your word processing software (though you could copy protect your OS disk and Software disk by cutting a little notch out of the side of the disk).