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When it comes to text-adventures, I was not-so-fashionably late to the party. The most well-known of these was 1977’s Zork. By now, Zork is a prehistoric artifact of a game, and it was still a crumbling relic of the past when I played it in the late 2000s. By then, I had already sunk my teeth into several ground-breaking open world sandboxes and intensive RPG experiences like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Dragon Age: Origins, so my palette was well and truly developing at an alarming pace.

And yet, discovering Zork was like opening Pandora’s Box and being swept away to a brand-new world. Gone were the memories of Tamriel and the Mythic Dawn cult. No longer was the Fifth Blight and the encroaching Darkspawn Horde on my mind. Zork kept it simple, and that was surprisingly appealing.

Text adventures come exactly as described, with no graphics or visuals of any kind, and Zork was no exception. The game begins in a field near a solitary house, and the narrator describes the area and indicates what directions are available to explore. It is then up to the player to input what they would like to do and where they wish to go.

These days, some might describe Zork and its ilk as archaic, but it has a nifty little trick up its sleeve that sets it apart from the blockbuster titles we’re used to now; Zork forces the player to use their own imagination, graphics card not required. The world isn’t flawlessly rendered in hyper-realistic detail for you to drink in, it is imagined in a completely unique way every single time. As a result, the faceless, nameless narrator is the real star, describing everything in creative detail and sprinkling in some cryptic humor here and there when the player encounters obstacles.

I remember struggling to make any significant progress and getting stuck in the aforementioned house. Heading into the attic, I was met with complete darkness, and failure to quickly react resulted in some unseen terror killing me. This cycle repeated for some time before I got the inkling to try a different direction at the beginning. Zork is totally non-linear, and it is less about an overarching goal you work to achieve and more about just exploring different parts of the game and seeing what you come across. I still didn’t get very far, falling victim to a pool of quicksand this time, but the memories of digging into Zork’s world are very vivid. A remarkable feat to achieve for a game with no graphics.

As I discovered much later after researching this unique text-adventure lost to time, I hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface, and there was an entire world’s worth of undiscovered areas and items I had no idea were even there. What appeared at first to be a quaint and inventive piece of interactive media was instead a fully-fledged fantasy world with its own backstory, made more enticing still by a series of its own secrets to uncover.

As the industry moved forward, I was moving back, submerging myself in a world I was too young to even remember. I hadn’t even been born in 1977, after all. My first foray into video games was with the first PlayStation. Text adventures had never even been on my radar until I stumbled across Zork by pure chance. I don’t even remember the specifics of how I came to find it, only that it was a complete accident. A very happy one, at that.

I suppose an overactive imagination certainly helps to visualize the adventure being embarked on through the mazes and underground caverns of Zork’s world. Still, it is well-capable of conveying what it wants to regardless of its audience’s ability to imagine its setting, taking players along on a journey like no other where they must read and process the information given to them as much as play the game. It’s not only innovative, it’s also an ingenious way to engage someone and, in turn, obligate them to engage with the game. In the absence of conventional means, Zork has plenty of tactics in use to ensure a player’s investment.

I’ve never been a stickler for graphics in games. Sure, a game that looks photorealistic can be a nice treat, but it would never be a dealbreaker for me. I would happily go back and play games from the early 2000s, looking exactly as they did when they released. Looking back now, I think Zork may have helped in that regard. During a time when I was just starting to explore how diverse and stylized different games could be, Zork made its mark as yet another new way to provide entertainment to those of us who were hungry for something fresh. Having enjoyed it to the last in all its text-based glory, graphics became an afterthought.

If something like Zork could be as enjoyable as it was without fancy graphics, then they weren’t even remotely essential to the experience. Enjoyability is paramount, after all. It’s the only real thing of worth when it comes to games. It says a lot that Zork is just as enjoyable today as it was in 1977.

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Richard is a freelance writer and content creator based in Ireland. When not drinking whiskey and making a fool of himself, he can be found replayingMass Effect 2*. You can find him on Twitter and on his personal blog.*