Classic text adventure
Zork I
A landmark text adventure built from words, curiosity, and the consequences of typing the first thing that comes to mind. Enter commands, explore at your own pace, and save deliberately when you want to keep your progress.
Interpreter is loading.
How to play
Zork I is a parser game: you type short instructions and the game answers in text. Press Enter to submit a command.
look— describe your surroundings again.inventory— list what you are carrying.north— move in a compass direction.take lamp— pick something up.open mailbox— interact with an object.
Ordinary verb-and-object phrasing usually works. Experiment; the game will say when it does not understand.
Saving and restoring
Type save or restore and use the interpreter’s own dialog. Saves are kept in this browser’s local storage for this site, and can also be downloaded to a file and re-uploaded later.
Progress is not saved automatically. Reloading this page, or navigating away and returning, restarts the story from the beginning; only an explicit save file restores earlier progress.
If browser storage or downloads are blocked, saving fails inside the interpreter and no progress is retained.
Accessibility and known limitations
Verified so far: keyboard operation of the page controls and the command line, touch command entry with the focus helper, responsive layout at 360, 390, 768, and 1440 pixels, readable text at enlarged text sizes, no motion or animation added by this page, and automated accessibility and browser checks.
Real-device VoiceOver and TalkBack testing is still pending. The interpreter is an embedded same-origin document with its own markup, so screen-reader behaviour inside the game window may vary between browsers and assistive technologies.
No timing, audio, or vision requirement is imposed by this page. No claim of WCAG conformance or universal accessibility is made.
Attribution and rights
Zork I was originally published by Infocom. The source code used here was released under the MIT License by Microsoft in 2025. It is played through a self-hosted Parchment-based interpreter.
Zork and related names and marks belong to their respective owners. This presentation is not sponsored, endorsed, or operated by Microsoft, Xbox, Activision, or the original publisher.
The physically distributed Z-machine subset used here — Parchment, AsyncGlk, GlkOte, FileSaver.js, Bocfel, Emglken, RemGlk-rs, and jQuery — is MIT-licensed. No GPL-2.0 component and no webfont is included.