Recommends Zork.

Transcript context

…A trilogy. Zork trilogy. I see it. Okay. And it was weird, and, like, the… Sometime in the ’90s, there was this, there was this era of what they called CD-ROM games. That’s how they branded them. And they made a return to Zork, but it now had graphics. And somehow, that just shattered everything, because the Zork you knew in your head didn’t exist anymore. Yeah, Zork was fantastic. I think it might be open source now, which I think is fabulous. But I highly recommend Zork. There was also, in those days, on the PC that worked on our IBM, was Ultima- … which was the Richard Garriott series. And he was Lord British. We knew him as Lord British. He put himself in the game. And you want to talk about world-building. You know, there was Yew Forest and there was all the characters. And the first Ultima I played was Ultima II, ’cause Ultima I was before my time. And that series, it was this RPG group-based PC game, and the worlds were just so rich. Like, you could get on a rocket ship. You’re playing in this fantasy world, fighting demons, and yet somehow you could get on a rocket ship. And then there was just all of this sort of crazy stuff that would happen in games that are based in the world. Like, there were bouncers in the towns, and merchants, but if you really wanted to, you could try to rob these people, or kill Lord British, you know? That was something that was super hard. And when you’re just a jackass kid, you spend your time endlessly trying to do these things over and over, and Ultima was really a profound kind of experience for me. And, of course, that led to Ultima Online, which is a legendary game in itself, perhaps connected to EverQuest. Sort of starting to build these worlds that are massively multiplayer online video games. Can you take me to that journey? Like, as you started to get online, the MMO world. What were influential? What were fun for you?…

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