I decided to play Zork through DALL-E on Twitter, and created a new account for it:
West of House You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. pic.twitter.com/Bc8nyPi5ge
I’m using a walkthrough, because I can’t remember how to solve all the puzzles 42 years on, not that I ever DID solve all the puzzles back in the day anyway!
I was all of 8 or 10 years old when I first played Zork, I think, in 1982 or ’84, on a PC at a friend’s house that I didn’t have infinite time on, so give me a break. I also had a Choose Your Own Adventure-like book adaptation of the game, which I “played” through many times when I was the same age. It wasn’t published by the CYOA people, but it was the same concept — Choose Your Own Adventure stories are basically a print form of the text adventure computer game in many ways, although a bit more limited in the choices the player can “input”. Zork was one of the most popular home computer games in the early 80s, at a time when tabletop role-playing games like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons were at one of their early peaks in popularity. Together these games created the cornerstones of the geek subculture, a movement which has blossomed and thrived since then, particularly as the internet took off in the 1990s.
DALL-E is a text-to-image AI developed by OpenAI, that uses natural language inputs to generate high quality images. It’s been growing in popularity in recent weeks as the internet has begun to discover and share the images created by it. A twitter account @weirddalle is worth a follow, if you like that sort of thing. (Which, who possibly couldn’t?)
I’ll be feeding the text of Zork through DALL-E as input, and the results, will be the images that I tweet along the text from the walkthrough on the twitter account for the project.
I get rate limited to 50 posts every 23.5 hours on DALL-E, so each time I hit my limit, I’ll have to take a break. Accordingly, it’s expected that this will take maybe a few days or weeks to complete. It’s also possible that I could run afoul of DALL-E’s anti-abuse filters with some parts of the game, and if that happens I will failover to CrAIyon, the DALL-E Mini AI. It doesn’t generate as good images, but it’ll do as a backup.
I’m really pleased with this project, it’s so simple and the execution is easy, but it’s fun, and I feel like a creative guy just for having the idea to do it. Simple ideas really make me happy.
To put Zork, one of the earliest PC text adventures, which was released some 42 years ago, into an AI-based text to image generating system, and see what it outputs for illustrations seems like the funnest, coolest thing you could do, and a great way to tie the cutting edge of technology to some of its early roots.
Not all of the images DALL-E will generate will be accurate to the game, and that’s OK. It’s fun just to see what it comes up with, using the sparse descriptions that the game gives. Most of Zork took place in your imagination, and so we get to see what an AI might imagine.
The downfall of this process is that DALL-E will not remember from one run to the next all the context from the previous events in the game, so it will in many cases forget things that it should be aware of, resulting in some odd continuity. But that’s not the point, of course. The point is to do something fun with technology, playing with it to see what happens.
If you want to play Zork for yourself, you can do that! It’s free to play in your browser through an embedded DOSBox emulator.
Since their invention, almost overnight videogames have made a lasting impact on the greater culture. Here are a few of my favorite memorable quotes from video games.
It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this!
Game:The Legend of Zelda
System: Nintendo Entertainment System
Year: 1986
It’s the mid-80’s. The NES is new, and a chip shortage has made this already-hot game a hard to find must-have for the holidays — despite being released in February. Limited quantities of the special gold cartridge meant that a lot of kids had to wait a long time to get their copy of the game everyone was talking about: The Legend of Zelda. In Link’s first encounter, he finds an old man in a cave with a gift and some memorable advice.
Welcome to adventure, kid.
It’s a secret to everybody.
Game:The Legend of Zelda
System: Nintendo Entertainment System
Year: 1986
There’s something seedy about taking free rupees from a cave-dwelling Moblin. Is this a legit offer? What’s the catch? Why is this overworld enemy helping us? But yes, it’s true. Everyone knows that the secret to getting ahead in the world is to have a little money. It can get you into places, and out of jams. You can never have too much, but you can only carry $255. Don’t spend it all in one place, unless it happens to be the hidden shop that sells the Blue Ring!
Uh Oh. The truck have started to move!
Game:Metal Gear
System: Nintendo Entertainment System
Year: 1987
Most videogames for the NES were developed in Japan, and accurate translation never seemed to be a high priority. So many memorable quotes from mid-80’s videogames are remembered for their quirky, incorrect grammar and hilarious misspellings.
In Metal Gear, you sneak about a military base attempting to keep a low profile lest you be discovered and create an international incident. While looking inside a few parked trucks for supplies to aid you in your mission, one of them happens to start up with you inside! Better lie low and hope that you will not be discovered, and that wherever it takes you doesn’t bring your mission to a premature end. Fortunately for you, the blundering enemy has in fact just made it easier for you to succeed, by taking you to an area on the base where you could not get to otherwise.
Earlier in the game, you encounter this tired guard, who, if you wait out of sight long enough, will fall asleep. Oddly, before nodding off he announces, to no one in particular, “I feel asleep!!” Either the designers meant to say he fell asleep, which makes no sense because he’s already asleep, or perhaps they meant to say he feels sleepy. Either way, it’s pretty funny.
The NES port of Metal Gear was a bug-ridden mess, but since most of us didn’t have an MSX to compare against, we had no idea, but we didn’t care. The sneaking about, using stealth tactics to infiltrate the base while quietly eliminating guards, and finding an arsenal’s worth of gear to blow up a nuclear-armed super-weapon were too important to let some bad English stop us.
Congratulation.
Game:1942
System: Nintendo Entertainment System
Year: 1986
A number of early Capcom NES games rewarded the player who successfully beat the game with this stingy accolade, “CONGRATULATION.” What, just one measly congratulation? Isn’t plural, multiple congratulations nearly always in order when complimenting someone’s happy success? After dogfighting your way through thirty-two (!) stages of bland, slow-moving shoot-em-up “action” against an unbearable monotone soundtrack, this is the thanks we get?
Literally, this is the entirety of what you get when you beat the game. Screw you, Capcom!
Fortunately, they more than made up for this with the sequel, 1943, which features improved everything, including one of the best soundracks on the NES. Capcom went on to produce some of the best titles on the NES, and found even greater glory in the 16-bit era with Street Fighter II. All is forgiven.
A winner is you!
Game:Pro Wrestling
System: Nintendo Entertainment System
Year: 1986
Pro Wrestling is one of those games that is pretty dumb, and yet really fun despite that, with a one of the hardest boss fights to win, the championship bout against Great Puma. But each time you manage to win a wrestling match, your reward was this message: A winner is you! All right! It really pumps up your self esteem!
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all [alike|different].
Game:Colossal Cave Adventure
System: DEC PDP-10, and others
Year: 1976
There’s so much quotable in Colossal Cave Adventure, considering the entire game is entirely text, and one of the first computer games ever. But this quote from the Maze is the one that I come back to the most. To create the feeling of being lost in a maze, the game just repeats the same text in each room, until you manage to solve the maze. There’s no feedback to tell you where you are, or to give yourself a reference point to have some idea where you are. After puzzling over this conundrum, successful players eventually figure out that if they drop an item from their inventory in a room, it will help them to make that room in the maze stand out from the others, enabling them to map out the maze with pen and paper.
To this day, whenever I’m in a confusing situation where there are many options and I don’t know which is the right one, I’ll think back to this one.
I am Error
Game:Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
System: Nintendo Entertainment System
Year: 1987
A genuine WTF moment in gaming occurs when you meet the infamous Error. This is all he ever says to you, “I am Error.” Is that his name? Or is he just a chronic screwup? Or is the game telling you that it has an Error? This was a matter for deep contemplation in 1987.
What a horrible night to have a curse.
Game:Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
System: Nintendo Entertainment System
Year: 1987
Castlevania II attempted to innovate by introducing adventure and RPG elements into the action-platformer formula. There’s a level-up system, and shops where you can spend money that you spend hours grinding for… so much grinding for XP and hearts in fact that this game is usually remembered as the least-liked of the NES Castlevania titles. Luckily the music was excellent. Unlike the first Castlevania, rather than having a linear progression through a series of stages, the game featured an open map that you could go back and revisit, and likely would need to several times while trying to figure out some extremely obscurely hidden secrets. Another innovation the game features is a day-night cycle, where during the nighttime hours, the enemies were stronger, doing twice as much damage, and taking twice as many hits to be defeated. Every couple of minutes, day would turn to night, or night to day, and every time the game would freeze and display this message to you… one character at a time… for about 30 seconds. It was… memorable, let me tell you.
Winners don’t use drugs
Game: Various arcade games
Year: 1989-2000
If you went to an arcade in the 1990s, you surely saw this message on a regular basis. I don’t know whether it ever stopped anyone from trying drugs who wanted to, but we sure did know who the Director of the FBI was.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Game: Zork
System: PC
Year: 1980
The early text adventure games borrowed liberally from one another. In Colossal Cave Adventure, you could die if your torch went out, falling into a pit in the pitch black darkness. In the Zork series, there were locations where you could die without a light source, but it made no sense to have a hole that you could fall into. Enter the Grue, a loathsome fell creature that inhabited only the darkest reaches, and had never been seen by anyone who lived. But what is a Grue? No one knew. Some speculate that the name derived from the word gruesome, which is certainly a likely sounding explanation. On the other hand, the term “grue” is also found in the philosophy of Nelson Goodman, which might have been familiar to the MIT students who formed Infocom. But they’re also a monster in the Dying Earth novels by Jack Vance. So which is it?
Fight, Megaman! For everlasting peace!
Game:Mega Man
System: Nintendo Entertainment System
Year: 1987
After winning the original Mega Man, we are informed that Mega Man has to continue to fight (basically telling you that you could now play the game again, enjoying it for “replayability”). “Fight, Megaman!” the game extolls us, “For everlasting peace!” What? How? That oxymoronic statement always gives me a chuckle.
President Ronnie has been kidnapped by the ninjas! Are you a bad enough dude to rescue Ronnie?
Game:Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja
System: Arcade (Data East)
Year: 1988
What could be more 80’s than a President named Ronnie? In the last year of Reagan’s presidency, this 2D beat-em-up gave us the attitude of cool badness that we all needed. Are you a bad enough dude? The game play in Bad Dudes wasn’t necessarily great, consisting of mostly standing around on platforms as the level slowly scrolled by, delivering repetitive one-punch or one-kick knockouts to an endless supply of cookie cutter Ninjas, without a great amount of depth or variety to the entire affair. This was a game anyone could beat, pretty much regardless of their skill level, as long as they had enough money. But the giant-sized, 16-bit sprites and (somewhat) challenging boss fights were enough to suck us in and drain the quarters from our pockets.
Barf!
Game:River City Ransom
System: Nintendo Entertainment System
Year: 1989
The famous last words of many dying students at River City High school, uttered as they blinked out of existence and left behind their bouncing pocket change. It’s funny that they apparently literally say “Barf!” rather than making the sounds of barfing, such as “Bleaugh!”
Finish him!!
Game:Mortal Kombat
System: Arcade
Year: 1992
The voice narration gave these words a chilling malevolence. When you hear this, having won two out of three rounds in the Mortal Kombat tournament, it’s time to unleash the combo that triggers your fatality move, giving your opponent a death worthy of the game’s title. Or, if you’re the loser, it’s time to endure the indignity and shame of having your body torn asunder, in the most unpleasant way imaginable. Yet, no matter how many times they die in the MK tournament, you everyone still gets to fight again in the endurance rounds.
Game Over
Game: Just about every one, ever.
System: All of them.
Year: Eternal
Game Over, man. Game over!
To be sure there are many more memorable videogame quotes that I’ve left out. What are your favorites?
