Something’s up in the Great Underground Empire, and I have no idea what it is.  Something seems oddly different about the place.  Abominable Snowmen have been seen wandering the hottest deserts, mucusoids are drying out and grues have been spotted sunbathing.  What the heck is going on?!

There’s a gremlin in our office, and that sneaky little imp (no offense to any actual imps reading this) is messing up our game!  He’s tweaking game parameters, changing the behaviour of monsters and generally giving us headaches as we try to keep with all the things he’s breaking.  We’re swamped right now and can’t manage to find every little thing that he’s changed so we’re turning to you guys!  Every day the gremlin changes two things about the game, one reasonably easy to spot, one a little more subtle, and it’s up to you guys to find them!  Think of it as one huge game of spot the difference.  And, like any game, there will be prizes!  We know that you guys may have to do some legwork exploring various locations to find these tweaks, so the first person to correctly guess the two things that have changed and post it on this thread in the forums will receive 100 shiny new Action Points!

In each case, the tweaks will be there for about a day before they’re reverted, and that little rogue changes something else! This will run every day until next Thursday, at which point we hope to have flattened the gremlin with an insanely oversized comedy hammer.  Please direct all questions, comments and wild guesses to this thread on the forums.  Happy hunting!

It’s cold in Quendor.  I mean, like, SERIOUSLY cold.  People are ice-skating over the Tidal Flats, Snow Wrights won’t go outside without their mittens, and at GUE Tech wizards are pulling wands on kids throwing snowballs at them.  There are reports that Hades has frozen over, but it’s too cold for anyone to go leave their fireplaces and check.

But why focus on the negative aspects when there’s so much merriment too?  The Drunk is happily drowning his festive cheer in eggnog, Christmas Tree Monsters are curiously numerous (and sometimes so docile that you’d swear they weren’t monsters at all) and, mingling with the usual cacophony of shouts and screams, the air tinkles with the sound of sleigh bells.  There are even reports of some fat guy in a red suit travelling around giving out free loot, if you’d believe such nonsense.  I mean, what kind of lunatic would give away something for nothing?

On a completely unrelated subject, how would you like some free avatars?

Yep, that’s right!  We’re getting in the festive spirit with some Christmas-themed avatars which you can grab in the Special tab of the Perks store! And, because it’s Christmas, you can get them for the magnificent price of 0 zm (and 0 Coconuts) right up until the New Year! Think of it as our little Christmas present to all you brave adventurers.  Or a cheap marketing ploy to trick you into loving us.  Regardless, the avatars are pretty frickin’ sweet!  Go check them out in the perks section, but be warned, there is a limit, so you may have one free avatar and only one free avatar.  After all, we wouldn’t want you to overdose on festive cheer

Happy Holidays!

Please use this forum thread to comment on this post.

We know you’re busy out buying presents, and frankly we wish we were too.  But you know what?  We’re too busy stuck inside trying to figure out what in the name of all things Zorky clue 4 in our new level 30 quest means!  We’ve been working at it all night, but from what we’ve gathered we have to stand on our heads for an hour while singing Jonathan Coulton’s Mr Fancy Pants and then we might gain some sort of insight as to where the next clue might be. In the meantime, my cat has had to learn how to open her own cans of food, my plants have to water themselves and the cheese in my fridge is starting to evolve into a sentient life form (I shall call it “Charles”).  You see the problem is that we’ve not just got one superbly written and magnificent quest this week, we’ve got TWO!  We’ve now plugged the last big gap in the low and mid level quests, with a continuous chain at five level intervals from levels 5 all the way up to 40, meaning we can focus much more attention on high-level quests, and you can all get back to enjoying high-quality shots of questy goodness straight into your eyeballs.

These two fine pieces of literature are, of course, from the pens of two of our Best Quest winners, with The Dead Walk from Reason and A Wizard and his Cocoa from Shushaz.

Along with this comes a miscellaneous cluster of bug fixes and a slightly more up to date version of our shiny new payment options page.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a wall to go balance against, and some more bruises to aquire.

Please use the appropriate thread on the forums to comment on this blog.

The Beatles said it best with “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand”.  After all, what’s the point of doing something magnificent if you can’t tell people about it in more than one language?  And now with the new language feature up and running, we bring you the chance to play Legends of Zork in German, Spanish or Spanish (Mexican)!  Arriba!  (Sorry, all the Spanish I know, I know from Looney Tunes).  We hope that this will make the game that much more accessible to others and introduce new swathes of players to the magnificent universe that is Zork.  Esperanto and Klingon versions are on their way.

But you think that’s enough?  Oh heck no!  Not only have we translated the game into three new languages, but we’ve also streamlined the payment options and made it a whole lot easier to buy coconuts.  You can pay using your credit or debit card, using SMS, prepaid options or Paypal, and we hope the whole process will be that bit clearer and easier.  We toyed with the idea of having money delivered by cosmic wormhole, but we worried that it might be used by advanced alien races to invade our planet, and anyway, our devs have enough work to do as it without worrying about the fabric of spacetime and gravitational singularities.

We have also put in some bug fixes.  What we have not done was put in a new quest, but there should be two quests going in next week to make up for the shortfall.

So, we hope that you enjoy the new additions to this game.  We were playing with the idea of taking the language settings further and creating an Adventurer Penpals scheme to improve your Spanish or German, but then the next logical step would be setting up Adventurer Exchanges whereby you could go adventuring with groups of Spanish speaking adventurers, and thus learn how to say “Nuts to you, Frobgoblin!” and “Hands off, that’s my loot!!!” in various languages, and that just felt like taking it a little too far

Please use this thread in the forums to comment on this blog post.

Having just finished my last read-through of the finalist entries, my brain is buzzing with excitement about this announcement, but at the same time I’m also sickeningly torn.  This competition has been an absolute pleasure to judge, and there have been no entries where I’ve held my head in despair and bemoaned the state of creative writing in this world.  I’ve come away from every one thinking “heh, I liked what they did with that one bit…” in regards at least one aspect of the quests, be it the humour, used, the clues or the story telling abilities of our players.  However, while they all had something to commend them, there were some which had absolutely nothing for me to nitpick over and which had me laughing and smiling the whole way through.  I knew our players had a magnificent grasp of Zorkish humour and wit, but to see it brought out so perfectly?  Honestly, I was expecting that maybe there’d be one of you out there who could bring it to life on the page, but instead I got a gaggle of you!  I’m so very glad that we added the rule about implementing more than the two winning quests, because there are quite a few quests that were of good enough quality to include, and a couple more (who won’t be listed here) who are going in a “Maybe” pile.

It’s clichéd beyond belief to say “Oh, you were all so good, it was really hard to choose!”, but when it came down to the top three, and I had to decide who would be first, second and who would get a “Yeah, you’re being included too” prize, I was genuinely sitting there reading them again and again, pouring over the notes I’d taken, and generally pulling my hair out trying to come to a decision.  In the end, there was one which was better than the other two, so I could, in good conscience, pick the overall winner.  However, when it came to choosing who was to get silver… well, it was tough.  It finally got to the stage where I was saying “Okay, either I flip a coin, or they both get second place prizes”, and given that I spent my last zorkmid on lunch (and flipping a sandwich isn’t quite as fun), I’ve just decided that there is simply going to be a joint second place prize awarded.  So, without further verbose torture, here are the results:

Winner:

“Enter the Face Breaker” by Afgncaap5

Runner(s) Up:

“The Grognards of Gygax” by Mungo Depanted
“The Dead Walk” by Reason

Not technically “Winners”, but too good to leave out of the game:

“A Truly Absurd Quest” by Mithicus Frotz
“A Wizard and his Cocoa” by Shushaz

We’ve got one big cart of coconuts to dish out to all of you listed, so congratulations to our winners, and to everyone who entered.  You’re going to make this game a whole lot more fun for all of us.

Please use this thread in the forums to comment on this blog.

Adventurers,

Wow.  I have to say, we were very pleasantly surprised by the response we got to the Best Quest Contest!  It feels all too often we think up slightly off the wall competition ideas which then fall flat on their face, and this was initially shaping up the same way, but then over the weekend there was an avalanche of last minute entries, much to our delight.

I must announce that the competition is now officially closed.  Unofficially, if an entry happens to turn up in the next couple of days, I’m sure we might forget when exactly it arrived and include it anyway   Not wanting to be unfair to those magnificent people who got theirs in on time, but if someone’s spent their evenings for the last week immersed in Zork lore and was defeated by something as wicked and cruel as a deadline, then I’m hardly going to pass over their work.  They will, however, get an appropriate frowny face, and any lateness will be considered in the final result.

The entries are now sitting in a vault, guarded by hellhounds, awaiting judgement from on-high, which will take place over the next week, with an official announcement on the winners next week (for a more up to date schedule on when you can expect results, keep an eye on the forums, where IX will be able to update you more frequently on the goings on of the judging).

Thank you to everyone who entered, this is definitely going to be one of the more entertaining competitions we’ve ever had to judge.

-The LoZ Team

ps.  please direct any comments to this thread on the forums.

Legends of Zork is known for many things.  Being legendary is one, and being Zorky (kinda) is another.  it’s also known for the never ending fun that one can get out of clicking the “Continue Adventuring” button, and those wonderful things that are “Continue Adventuring” buttons draped in plot: Quests! And hey, guess what we have this week?  That’s right, terrible weather, and a brand new quest!  We know there was some delay getting this quest out there, but we hope that it’s worth the wait and that you’ll all enjoy the crazy adventures in “Scavenger Hunted”.

Our writer had the idea to put out a Halloween-specific quest which we all got quite excited about, until he told us that the text was going to just being “You have been eaten by a Grue! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!” followed by some monkey nuts as a reward.  After having him committed, we dug around on his computer and found that one, which we hope you’re going to enjoy more than being chewed on by an fantasy creature.

Please use this thread on the forums to comment on this blog.

*Equips helmet with the highest DR in the office*

Okay, those of you who read this blog may remember that in the last update I said that there would be a quest coming out today.  However, an unforeseen problem with one of our sites meant that the devs weren’t able to implement the quest on time for testing and release, so it has been pushed back to next week’s release.

However, there is some very good news that comes with this!  1) Next week we should be in a better position to know what changes we will soon be able to make and what content can be added to the game in the immediate future. And 2) to make up for the problems with the quest, we’re throwing a Super-Duper Sale!  From 12:00 (GMT) tomorrow, Friday, until 12:00 (GMT) on Monday, you can buy your charms at a 25% discount!  Unfortunately, as tomorrow is Halloween, this means that I’m going to have to write the rest of this blog filled with terrible, terrible clichés and sales pitches. I apologise profusely.

Hey, are you ready for Halloween?!  YOU BETTER BE!!! Because if you’re not covered with at least four charms of St. Quakko’s Protection, chances are you’ll not only be eaten by a grue, but by every other kind of ghost, goblin and ghoul going.  And when our spooooooky special has a scary 25% off, you’ve got no excuse not to give yourself (and your fame) all the protection you can!  But hey, maybe being scared by monsters isn’t you thing?  Have no fear, we have the item for you!  Ever get halfway through your trick-or-treat run and suddenly realise that your bag is now full to the brim with candy?!?  Well then you need Barbel’s Deceptively Capacious Backpack, scientifically proven to be able to carry enough sugary goodness to put you into a candy coma!  Trick-or-treat route too short? Use an Enchanted Bloodhound Tooth to find new locations!  Trick-or-treat route too long?  Get yourself an Aimfiz Amulet and get home in the blink of eyepatch!  With deals this good, we’re going to scare our accountants to death!!!

ps.  Just a reminder that our Best Quest Contest is still running!  More details here.

pps. Please post all comments in regards this blog on this forum thread.

Well, it’s been a little while since there was a blog post updating the going’s on in the world of LoZ, but there have been good reasons for this. To say that it’s been a time of great change and transformation here in the Jolt offices is putting it a bit mildly, and while we can’t go into any details right now, future announcements should reveal the reason for this. Suffice to say, there’s a hollowed out volcano somewhere in Ireland that’s going to be launching a laser-bearing satellite into space.  Don’t be surprised if hear that the East Coast of the United States is being held to ransom for ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!!  BWAHAHA-… ahem…

Joking aside, we know it’s been a long time since there has been a meaningful update to Legends of Zork, but there’s been a code merge going on in the background, a large part of which is transforming the game into a multi-lingual extravaganza, meaning that non-English speakers will finally be able to explore the world of Quendor in their chosen tongue.  Which is great, although it means that I have to learn how to say “Welcome to the Great Underground Empire” and “Die, foul Kobold!” in a bunch of new languages.  So far I’ve gotten to “Willkommen in dem Grossen Untergrund Reich” and I’m not even sure I’ve got that right… Unfortunately, while this is a great step towards international peace and unity, it does mean that we haven’t been able to make any changes to the game for the past while, and any changes that we make in the next week will have to be absolutely minimal.  If we did implement any new features while this going on, we’d have to double back and implement it AGAIN in the new batch of code, which would be a horrendous use of time.  So, rather than wasting our time implementing and reimplementing changes, we’ve been planning and preparing for the next wave of content and features for you good people.

We have a whole raft of game design specs prepared, with some new features that we are very, very excited about, as well as another wave of new content that we’re gearing up for.  The next feature coming up will be the “Dungeons” feature (after all, what is Zork unless you can get down and dirty with some underground exploration?), which will bring a whole new depth to exploration and PvP.  Thanks to quantum physics, we can’t be sure when this new feature will be rolled out, but I can tell you that the next release will definitely include a new quest.  Which is quite a nice segue into my next point…

The Best Quest Contest!

You know how we keep giving you beautifully written quests that are going to be winning a Nobel Prize for literature any day now?  (Hell, I’d be happy with an IgNobel Prize…)Well, I’m sure that you’ve been reading through them and occasionally thought “Hmm, these hack job quests are filled with spelling mistakes and bad jokes!  I could do better than this, any day of the week.” Oh yeah?  Well, here’s your chance to show me how it’s done, with our very own Do-It-Yourself Adventure competition!  Yep, you can now write your very own quests, and if they’re good enough, we’ll put them in the game!  Here’s how it works:

You write a quest, full of hilarity of cunning, and submit it to us.  We look at all the entries, pick a winner (and a runner up) and then put them in the game, showcasing your work to tens of thousands of other players.  The winner also gets forty delicious coconuts for their trouble, with the runner up getting twenty.  (Disclaimer:  We’re all too aware of the possibility that we’re sitting on an untapped pool of magnificent talent, so if there are more entries that are just too awesome to not put in, we may be tempted to give out additional prizes of ten coconuts per amazing quest).  Sounds simple, huh?  Well, just to complicate it a little, here are some rules that you’ll have to follow so we can easily fit the quests into the existing quest template:

1)  The Quest can have as many or as few stages as you want, but try to keep it to a reasonable length.  A two stage quest is going to have to be incredibly well written to win, while quests of epic length can drag on a little.  Trust me, one TGU is enough.

2)  The Quest must begin and end at a base.

3) The following are the terms used in writing a quest:

a)  Event Text: a text which appears instantly when you visit a specified base.  The first and last texts in the quest MUST be event texts, or our code catches fire and explodes.

b)  Discovery Text: a text which appears when you’re exploring at a location.  You discover this text rather than encountering a monster.  Each stage has one discovery text.  Comes with gold idol icon and green tick.

c)  Close Call:  A text that appears when you’re exploring in the right area, but haven’t found what you’re looking for yet.  Each stage has 3 close call texts.  Comes with gold icon and question mark.

d)  Lost Text:  A text that appears when you’re exploring in the wrong area.  Should include subtle clues that point you in the right direction.  Each stage has 3 Lost texts.  Comes with gold icon and red X.

e) Letter:  A message delivered by the in-game messaging system (as in TGU).

Note:  In this case Close Call and Lost Texts are optional.  It’s better if you include them, but if you don’t we can use some stock texts or write some for the quest.  Letters are also entirely optional.

4)  A standard quest should have this structure:  Stage 1 (Event Text, 3xLost, 3x Close Call, Discovery), Stage 2 (3xLost, 3x Close Call, Discovery), Stage 3 (3xLost, 3x Close Call, Discovery), Stage 4 (3xLost, 3x Close Call, Discovery, Event Text), but altered to however many stages you think is appropriate.  You can have Letters delivered at the beginning of any stage, if you choose to.

5)  Obviously, the quest should try and hit that Zorky humour, and should fit as well as possible with the style of the quests that are already up there.  We don’t want to restrict your own creativity, but at the same time the quests do need to fit smoothly into the game, so try and strike a balance between your own style and that of Zork.

6) We reserve the right to edit any quest that we’re going to put into the game.  This is mostly so we can fix any spelling mistakes or typos that slip in there, but if there are major changes that need to be made to any quests then we will try to make them in consultation with the author.

7) Obviously, Zork is a game open to all ages, so please keep it clean and suitable.

8)  Please bear in mind where is and isn’t a suitable location for your quest.  If you’re writing a quest for level 40 players and have them exploring in the Dark Forest, don’t expect them to be happy about it (although if your narrative demands it, you may get away with it, but keep it to a minimum).

9)  Puzzles of varying degrees of cunning are not required, but are encouraged.  However, what seems a perfectly logical way of solving a puzzle for you might seem insane to another person, so if you are including puzzles in your quest, please have a section at the end of your document briefly explaining the solution to the puzzle.

10) Bear in mind that people from all over the world will be reading this, so try and avoid references or puzzle solutions that depend on an intimate knowledge of baseball, Cornish Pasties, the Paris Metro, or something else that’s particular to a specific nation or region.

Trust me, these rules are important.  Each one of them has been forged in the fires of some horrible mistake that we’ve made before, and we’re keen to learn from those experiences.

Quest writing is a complex business, so there will be thread set up on the forums to answer any and all questions (related to the competition.  We won’t be doing life, the universe and everything style questions).  Please send all entries to breagmor@gmail.com, and direct enquiries to this thread on the forums.  To discuss any other aspects of this blog, please direct comments to this thread.

Closing date is 9th of November, so get scribbling!

Looking forward to reading your submissions.

Well, it’s been a little while since we’ve supplied you with a quest, mostly due to a shortage of the giant marble blocks from which our quests are usually carved (for the first draft, obviously.  Later quests are inscribed in Onyx and hair-thin crystal).  However, we are now in a position to bring out yet another wonderful tale of our dear AFGNCAAP (”Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person” for those of you not fortunate enough to have played Grand Inquisitor.  At least, AFGNCAAP is what we aim for…)!  This time it’s a quest for those of you of slightly advanced years, as the level 60 players get treated to some narrative.  Now, I obviously don’t want to say anything that might ruin it for you, but I don’t think I’d be spoiling it too much if I tell you that 1) this quest is, very possibly, the single greatest quest ever written, and 2) the butler did it.  Well, actually the butler’s dog did it, but legally the butler was responsible for the dog, so he’s the one who’s going to have to pay the fine…

We appreciate that a level 60 quest is out of reach for most of you right now, but don’t worry, we will be adding more quests for other level players soon.  Intermittently spacing out our quests is a habit we’re hoping to get into; dishing out quests to low, middle and high level players in turn so that no one feels like we’re favouring one group of players over the other.  Consequently, the next quest you see appearing will be something dropped square in the middle of our players.  Think of it as a cluster bomb, but with more plot and less dismembered limbs.  Well, slightly less…  We can’t promise anything.

All comments on the forums, if you please.