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Zork: The Great Underground Empire

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
Zork: The Great Underground Empire
Zork: The Great Underground Empire cover
Developers
Infocom
Engines
ZIL
Release dates
DOS December 1980
Mac OS (Classic) 1984
Windows (DOSBox) January 18, 2011[1]
Linux May 20, 2020
Taxonomy
Monetization One-time game purchase
Modes Singleplayer
Perspectives Text-based
Controls Text input
Genres Text adventure
Series Zork
Zork: The Great Underground Empire on HowLongToBeat
Zork: The Great Underground Empire on IGDB
Zork: The Great Underground Empire guide on StrategyWiki
Zork: The Great Underground Empire on MobyGames
Zork: The Great Underground Empire on Wikipedia
Zork: The Great Underground Empire 1980
Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz 1981
Zork III: The Dungeon Master 1982
Enchanter (series)
Wishbringer 1985
Beyond Zork 1987
Zork Zero 1988
Return to Zork 1993
Zork Nemesis 1996
Zork: The Undiscovered Underground 1997
Zork: Grand Inquisitor 1997

General information

"Official" developer fan site
Interactive Fiction Wiki - A wiki for all text adventure games
Zork Wiki - A small wiki for every Zork game made
Zork Bug List
GOG.com Community Discussions for game series
GOG.com Support Page
Steam Community Discussions

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Retail
DRM details are not known
DOS
Mac OS
GOG.com
DRM-free
Pre-packaged with DOSBox.[2] Bundled in The Zork Anthology
Windows
Steam
Icon overlay.png
Bundled in The Zork Anthology.
Windows
Publisher website
DRM-free
Freeware based on released source code.
Linux
THCNET 404 is a version modified to add in MMO-lite multiplayer interaction.

Version differences

Essential improvements

Recommended Z-machine interpreters

A Z-machine standards document is available for those wishing to make their own interpreter.

Utilities

A list of various Zork related tools and utilities can be found here.

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

System Location
DOS
Windows <path-to-game> (mounted in DOSBox)[Note 1]
Mac OS (Classic)
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/570580/pfx/[Note 2]

Save game data location

System Location
DOS <path-to-game>\
Windows <path-to-game>\SAVE[Note 3]
<path-to-game> (mounted in DOSBox)[Note 1]
Mac OS (Classic)
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/570580/pfx/[Note 2]

Save game cloud syncing

System Native Notes
GOG Galaxy
Steam Cloud
ScummVM 2.1+ supports cloud saves on third-party cloud storage services. See the ScummVM documentation for details.

Video

Input

Keyboard and mouse State Notes
Remapping
For DOSBox use the DOSBox Mapper (see the glossary page for other workarounds).
Mouse acceleration
Mouse sensitivity
Mouse input in menus
Mouse Y-axis inversion
Controller
Controller support
For DOSBox use the DOSBox Mapper (see the glossary page for other workarounds).
Controller types

Audio

Audio feature State Notes
Separate volume controls
No sound.
Surround sound
Subtitles
Everything is text-based.
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost
For DOSBox change the priority background value in the DOSBox configuration file.
Royalty free audio

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English

Other information

API

Technical specs Supported Notes
DOS video modes CGA, EGA, MCGA, VGA, SVGA
ExecutablePPC16-bit 32-bit 64-bitARM Notes
Linux
Mac OS (Classic)

System requirements

DOS
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) 5.0
Processor (CPU) IBM PC or 100% compatible
System memory (RAM) 512 KB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 2 MB
Video card (GPU) CGA, EGA, MCGA, VGA, SVGA


Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 File/folder structure within the installation folder reflects the path(s) listed for DOS game data. For the GOG.com release, file changes in DOSBox are redirected to <path-to-game>/cloud_saves/ even if GOG Galaxy is not used (this folder contains all redirected files, so some files in the cloud_saves folder might be temporary files or other files that do not contain saves or settings).
  2. 2.0 2.1 File/folder structure within this directory reflects the path(s) listed for Windows and/or Steam game data (use Wine regedit to access Windows registry paths). Games with Steam Cloud support may store data in ~/.steam/steam/userdata/<user-id>/570580/ in addition to or instead of this directory. The app ID (570580) may differ in some cases. Treat backslashes as forward slashes. See the glossary page for details.
  3. When running this game without elevated privileges (Run as administrator option), write operations against a location below %PROGRAMFILES%, %PROGRAMDATA%, or %WINDIR% might be redirected to %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore on Windows Vista and later (more details).

References