Playing Zork as your intro to text adventures in this day and age is akin to playing King's Quest as your intro to graphical adventures nowadays. You just don't

Playing Zork as your intro to text adventures in this day and age is akin to playing King's Quest as your intro to graphical adventures nowadays. You just don't do that. Not in a world where Monkey Island also exists. KQ and Zork are both iconic for various reasons, but none of those reasons are because the games are particularly good. They wantonly kill the player, they let you get into unwinnable states, they have puzzles that are essentially impossible. . . hey, it was a new genre, folks were still figuring things out. In the case of text adventures, I'd suggest starting with something like Anchorhead (long, horror), Lost Pig (short, humorous) or Savoir-Faire (medium, historical-ish).