The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 10 out of 10]

• Developer: Logical Shift
• Price: Free

[This is the Pick of the Week for December 11th, 2006]

Many years ago, I wrote about playing Zork on OS X using a Unix program called jZip. While this worked, it was never the ideal experience -- the program errored out on quit, it had to be run from Terminal, and there were quite a few text adventure games it wouldn't play. But it worked. After writing the story, I didn't pay all that much attention to it, until I got back in playing a bit of Zork in my free time recently.

When I revisited the story, I found a link in the comments to Zoom, a newer interpreter for Zork (and other Infocom and interactive fiction games). After a brief trial, it's obvious this is a much better solution. It plays Zork. It plays all the other Infocom games, even those that rely on some graphics. And it plays tons of other interactive fiction games. If you like interactive fiction, check out Zoom. And for a collection of games to play with it, visit the Interactive Fiction archive (the original MIT Zork is listed there under zdungeon.