Yesterday a Reddit link started going around the IF circles:
“Wait,” I thought, “haven’t I seen that map before?” No, I had not. But I sort of had? Then I looked through my collection of Zork maps. Then I realized, oh no, I have a collection of Zork maps, and it’s incomplete.
Project time! Let’s start at the very beginning.
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| Zork map, David Lebling, 1978 |
The original fair-hand map of MIT Zork, drawn by one of the Implementors during the game’s development. Look at that French-curve showcase of a logo!
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- Map archived by Rick Thornquist, published in this article, 2017.
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| Zork official hint map, David Ardito and David Lebling, 1981 |
Once Infocom began publishing Zork as a commercial product, there was an obvious market for hints. Here’s Infocom’s very first hint-book map. It was advertised within the game itself. An in-game note told you to write away to Infocom for “…the Movement Assistance Planner (MAP) and Hierarchical Information for Novice Treasure Seekers (HINTS)”.
This message only existed in the very earliest releases of Zork (the ones labelled “R2” and “R5” in this catalog). This was so early that the game was not yet branded “Zork 1”.
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- Article describing this map at CGWMuseum.
- See Jimmy Maher’s blog post for more on Infocom’s history in those early years.
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| Zork 1 poster, David Ardito, 1981 |
This lovely poster was drawn for Infocom by David Ardito.
The poster is not meant as a map, of course. It’s a collection of instantly-recognizable vignettes from the game: white house, troll, cyclops, the Land of the Dead. But the spatial connections between some areas are visible.
You can spot the Adventurer, wearing the same ridiculous headgear as in the “Barbarian Zork” cover illustration. The Thief lurks genteelly behind. And if you peer very closely, you’ll find that the priceless painting in the Studio appears to be a miniature of this entire poster.
(Another detail: the altar in the Temple is inscribed with the names “Jacob”, “Carrie”, and (?) “Juok”. Anybody know what that’s about?)
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| Zork 1 map from the Zork Users Group, David Ardito and Steve Meretzky, 1982 |
A year later, Infocom had sort-of-but-not-really spun off its marketing division as the “Zork Users Group”. (Again, see Jimmy Maher’s history.) ZUG distributed maps, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and more. This was one of their earlier Zork maps. It has the line-and-box diagrammatic style, familiar to any adventurer who ever scribbled a map on scrap paper. But David Ardito embellished it with more Zork vignettes. (Some are taken directly from the color poster above. The Adventurer has lost the silly helmet, though.)
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| Zork 2 poster from the Zork Users Group, Pier Giovanni Binotti, 1983 |
ZUG still sold the posters, though. This is their Zork 2 poster, in a completely different style, by Pier Giovanni Binotti. The fine ink drawing leaves plenty of room for easter-egg detail. I’ll only note one quirk: in the starting location, the brass lantern is drawn as a flashlight rather than the traditional Tilley lamp.
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| Zork 1 map from Infocom, 1983 (page 1) |
Sometime in 1983, ZUG was reabsorbed into Infocom. The updated official hint-book map uses the same diagrams, but the artistic detail has sadly been replaced by a generic stone-wall texture. Well, I shouldn’t say generic — it’s the dungeon wall motif from the Zork logo. But it’s not very interesting.
Infocom continued to use this map all the way through the Activision acquisition, the Lost Treasures and Masterpieces collections, and even the 2012 Lost Treasures re-release on the iOS App Store.
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- Complete Zork 1 map booklet at the Infodoc Project.
But let us not imagine that the story of Zork maps was over! Fans have been drawing their own maps since the earliest years.
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| Dungeon map by Steven Roy, 1982 |
In 1982, Steven Roy drew this handsome map of th
