Get Ready For Legends Of Zork

"You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. Inside is a leaflet announcing Legends of Zork, a new browser-based 'casual MMOG' set in the Great Underground Empire."

"The Great Underground Empire has recently fallen and the land is in disarray. The Royal Treasury has been sacked. The stock market has collapsed, leading even mighty FrobozzCo International to fire employees from throughout its subsidiaries," publisher Jolt Online Gaming said in a press release. "A craze of treasure-hunting has swept through the remnants of the Great Underground Empire. The New Zork Times reports that trolls, kobolds and other dangerous creatures are venturing far from their lairs. Adventurers and monsters are increasingly coming into conflict over areas rich with loot. It's a dangerous time to be a newly-unemployed traveling salesman, but it's also a great time to try a bit of adventuring."

The "persistent online adventure" will be accessible via any browser, including the Apple iPhone, with no external software to download. "As a complete Zork geek, I'm very proud to be releasing this title," said Jolt CEO Dylan Collins. "Anyone who plays MMOs will definitely like to spend some time with Legends of Zork while they're taking a break or browsing around the web. It's very addictive."

The original Zork was an early adventure game created in the late 1970s for mainframe computers and then translated to home systems of the era when three of the original programmers helped found Infocom. The first Zork interactive adventures spanned a trilogy and also launched numerous related titles, most recently the graphical adventure Zork Grand Inquisitor, released in 1997.

No release date has been set, but the game is expected to enter beta testing soon, and sign-ups for future notifications are being taken at legendsofzork.com. Not familiar with Zork? An online version is available at thcnet.net. Give it a shot!