Zork I: The Great Underground Empire

December 6, 2025
Hours: Saturday 11am - 5pm
Location: Chicago Gamespace, 2418 W Bloomingdale Ave, Chicago, IL

Gamespace is proud to feature Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, an early text adventure created by four MIT graduates: Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, and Bruce Daniels. In the game, players type commands into a text parser to collect treasures scattered throughout a subterranean world. Much of Zork centers trial-and-error experimentation and inventory management, prioritizing these elements over a traditional literary plot. The game was heavily influenced by Will Crowther and Don Woods’s Colossal Cave Adventure, retaining its fantasy tone and underground setting while introducing a more humorous voice and significantly improving the parser’s ability to interpret natural language inputs. Its title, “Zork,” was playful hacker slang on the MIT campus for an unfinished or experimental program.

Because the original mainframe version was too large to run on early home computers, the team created a company to sell the game and divided it into three parts. The first installment, Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (1980), is the version playable here on a Commodore 64, preserving both the early home-computer experience and the game’s lasting influence on interactive storytelling.

Zork I: The Great Underground Empire is part of a multi-site exhibition titled The Plot Thickens: Storytelling in Gaming. Presented at venues across Michigan and Illinois, Plot Thickens explores different approaches to narrative and storytelling in games. It is organized by Chicago Gamespace and West Shore Community College and curated by Jonathan Kinkley and Eden Ünlüata-Foley.