#zork

This. Is my pride and joy. A gift for my dad, who played Zork with me when I was a kid, and with his dad when he was a kid. I designed this pattern myself and had a great time puzzling out how to hide the glow in the dark letters!

Buy the pattern here!

A short but informative overview of computer adventure games, their relationship to D&D, and some sample code that could form a building block for much longer adventures -- Eric Grevstad's article "Spellbound!" in K Power magazine #3, Scholastic Books, April 1984, with art by Charles Shields.

K Power was aimed at a range of teenagers in middle school through high school, and presumably was marketed through the Scholastic book fairs in schools. Both adults and high school students contributed articles and programs, and one commenter in this issue was as young as age 9.

This "magazine for the computer generation" leans into the theme of age gaps here, with this article teasing that your parents will be confused, but you'll be in the know. The word "hacker" appears repeatedly throughout every issue, and from context seems to mean "a cool creative person using a computer," maybe a little edgy but not denoting illicit or illegal activity. You can be a real hacker by typing one of the provided programs into a computer, or by taking the next step and writing your own code for any purpose. The movie WarGames was released the year before but the backlash against "hacker" bogeymen had not soured these writers on the term.

A few illustrations from the official Japanese guidebook for Zork I: The Great Underground Empire.