Not that I'd know personally. I never played the text based Zork games. They were before my time. But the reverence for their humor was an undercurrent to nearly every other adventure game I read about or played.
Honestly I'm not sure why I kept buying the graphical Zork games as a kid. I never really liked Return to Zork, although the rather sizeable print copy of the Encyclopedia Frobozzica it came with was well worth the price, and gave me a lot more enjoyment that the game itself. Zork Nemesis looked really pretty, and it's panning environments put Myst and 7th Guest to shame, but as a kid I found myself stuck constantly given my refusal to take notes. All the puzzles in Nemesis involve copious note taking.
Whatever the reason for my persistence, it paid off. I loved Zork Grand Inquisitor as a kid. I must have really beat my head against it, because unlike other games I'd played for the first and last time over 20 years ago now, I remember it like the back of my hand. A feat that was at once validating, and also ruined the game for me.
Grand Inquisitor took me not even two complete evenings to beat. Only a single puzzle solution had escaped my memory. It was every bit as rote a gaming session as playing through the shareware episode of Doom, but a great deal less enjoyable without the twitch action to liven things up. I really wasn't expecting it to be so tedious.
Going through approximately two hours of effortless puzzle solutions without giving them a thought, moving from cutscene you remember to cutscene you remember. It really was not the joyful nostalgia trip I was expecting. I'm kind of bummed out. I replayed Nemesis not terribly long ago, and actually enjoyed playing it thanks to my far fuzzier recollection a great deal more.
It truly is a shame. I guess I just loved the game too thoroughly back in 1997 to leave anything left behind to enjoy now.
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