Zork's Inaccessibility Shielded it from the Satanic Panic

Gathering treasure is an important part of Zork II, but assembling the booty in a trophy case is not the ultimate goal. In order to win, the interactor must have the player character supply these treasures to a powerful demon. This demon (like the robot) will do the adventurer a critical service-after he is propitiated. From the standpoint of the adventurer, Zork II adds a new and innovative motivation to the usual drive to plunder: Satanism. Such demonic elements were also found in Zork: The Malifestro Quest, a spin-off book for children that used a format similar to those of Choose Your Own Adventure books. A Cape Cod newspaper, The Register, reported a denunciation of this book in its 16 May 1995 issue. Jan Leary, the mother of one of this book's readers, called for the book to be removed from the school library and school book fairs. "Such reading promotes demonic worship," Leary said, "and glorifies violence for school children" (qtd. in Infocom, Inc. 1985).The more detailed and interactive Satanic experience of Zork II, in which the player character must summon a demon, enlist him to service, and (essentially) instruct him to murder someone, would no doubt have raised even more severe concerns-if it had even been noticed by parents. Text adventures were inaccessible, however, to those not adept at puzzle solving and not fluent in the dialect of English their parsers understood. This marginalized the form, but it also may have helped it elude strict parental control. By being esoteric, interactive fiction was less likely to be noticed by those who would suppress free expression. It was still noticed by some, though, who seized on any mention of magic (e.g., in the packaging or in advertisements) as proof that, as Steven Meretzky (2002) said, "Infocom was actually the Great Satan."

Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (2003)

• christianity
• interactive fiction
• satanic panic