Play Zork on your Kindle at Kindlequest

Update October 11th, 2010: After I posted this, several mainstream publications picked up the story and started circulating it. There’s not much new to add except for a different URL that doesn’t use “Kindle” in the name: http://www.portablequest.com/. Enjoy!

If you’re tired of Minesweeper, don’t like the free word games Shuffled Row and Every Word, and don’t want to pay $5 for the new Scrabble game, then how about old-school text adventures?

a list of the games available
at kindlequest.com

On Friday, Kindle fan E. Yagi announced on Amazon’s customer discussion pages a new website, kindlequest.com, that presents 19 different text adventures–including a few Zork titles–for your amusement. Of course, to play you’ll have to have online access.

I tested in on a latest generation Wi-Fi Kindle and the site loaded fine, although a couple of times the page would hang after I entered a command and I would have to reload the page to get everything to show up properly. If you want to give the interface a trial run before hitting it up on your Kindle, it plays fine on a regular PC browser.

Remember to type “help” without quotation marks for some introductory commands. Also, here are a few Zork-specific commands if you need a cheat sheet, thanks to another Amazon customer named Abraxas:

> n, s, e, w
Short for “go north”, “go south”, etc.

> nw, ne, sw, se
Short for “go northwest”, “go southwest”, etc.

> u and d
Short for “go up” and “go down”

> i
Reveals a player’s inventory

> verbose
Gives full descriptions after each command (rather than omitting details already given to the player)

> score
Displays the player’s current score, number of moves, and ranking

And you can shorten “look” to “l”. I also found the game wants prepositions. You cannot omit them. Just use “look at