Returning Zork

Matt Webb mentioned Zork in a recent post:

Back in the day, text adventures were games with a natural language interface.

Zork (1977) was the first well-known one.

This surfaced a long-forgetten memory from when I was a teenager, likely about 17: I had read about Zork, and desperately wanted to try it out on my computer. I bought a copy from a computer shop—it was in Oakville, Ontario, if memory serves—and installed it on my Commodore 64. 

Then I played it for awhile, wasn’t impressed, and packed it up and returned it (for some reason this was allowed).

The memory remains because I remember my father being quite angry at me for doing this: he thought the idea of buying something, using it and then returning it was fundamentally dishonest.

To this day, as Lisa will attest, that’s a deeply-imprinted value of mine, and it’s rare if ever that I’ll return something to a store simply because I didn’t like it.