Zork I

A great podcast about Zork I is Eaten By A Grue: Episode 1.

and here’s a good article Eaten by a Grue: A Brief History of Zork from Mental Floss.

The easiest way to play this game is to buy it from GOG in The Zork Anthology, which is pretty cheap for five Zork games and one extra text adventure game, Planetfall. The preferred method is to play Zork: The Great Underground Empire for RetroAchievements using the retroachievement emulator RAppleWin to play Zork I. If you’re using Linux you can use WINE to play the RAppleWin. Only the Apple ][ version has retroachievements right now, but Zork is pretty much the same regardless of what system you play it on. As I played this game for this post, I highly recommend the full Zork experience, which means playing on a desktop computer or laptop with a real keyboard and emulating an old computer or using DOSBox. I recommend using the Zork User Group Map (which is below from Internet Archive), a hintbook, if you can find one, and your favored guide from GameFAQs. Ideally you would want to finish a game without a guide, but this game is quite opaque in some of its solutions, and requires some very skilled map making in some parts. If you want to make a map using your computer, Trizbort is highly recommended.

You can play for free below, thanks to Internet archive.