To understand Interactive Fiction, you have to travel back to the 70's when computers took up a large room, paper terminals ruled, and the primary programming l

To understand Interactive Fiction, you have to travel back to the 70's when computers took up a large room, paper terminals ruled, and the primary programming language was COBOL. In those days, there were no graphics. None. There was no animation. Apple and IBM had not created microcomputers yet. There was no Amiga or Commodore. At this time, in the mid to late 70's, high school students were just getting access to paper terminals that "dialed in" over coupler modems. Taking a programming class was an elective and few did. There also wasn't any D&D or role playing games. None of this existed. So along comes these two free games on these school mainframes; Adventure and Dungeon (later split into three commercial Zork games). They had the audacity of allowing you, the player, to type anything you wanted, and the computer would respond, at that time, very intelligently. By today's standards it may seem simple, but back then, it was the equivalent of playing Assassin's Creed today. This seemingly "open world" gaming changed everything about computers. It inspired everything that came after, including video games and still is the foundation of much of the standard game play of today. Now. Zork was old school "IF". It was hard, illogical at times, and on a fairness scale probably as high as it gets. But puzzles are puzzles. If you like easy puzzles or puzzles that give you a cheat sheet, then are you really being challenged or are you just looking for entertainment? I prefer a challenge because that _is_ what entertains me. So first realizing that the Thief in Zork will steal all your possessions (whether you drop them or not), then realizing you have to kill him, then realizing he's the only one that can open the egg, then realizing that he's really hard to kill in certain situations, then realizing you can use the DIAGNOSE command to warn you when you're about to die so you can run away and get better. To me, that's not boring at all. That is essentially the same kind of challenging puzzle you'll find in any of today's video games. It's just that the "graphics" are in your head. Not on a screen.