Zork and the Case of the Mixed Up Barbarians
If you’re a fan of Zork or Infocom’s other Interactive Fiction games you may have heard of or seen the infamous “Barbarian” cover, famously disliked by the developers because they felt it misrepresented their game.
Like most Radio Shack Catalog games, it came packaged in a Ziploc bag containing just the manual and a floppy disk. This release for the TRS-80 Model I is widely considered to be one of the earliest releases of Zork, released in December 1980. Physical copies are rare and hard to find; according to Infocom’s own sales numbers they only sold ~1,500 copies over the following eight months.
There’s just one small problem. The Radio Shack release pictured above is actually a re-release from the middle of 1982. Don’t believe me? If you’re fortunate enough to own a copy, open it to the third page and look at the copyright info there. The rest of us will have to make do with a photo.
If you’re a collector or knowledgeable about these games, you might be inclined to point out that Zork got re-released for the Model III, a later model of the TRS-80, and only the Model I version of the game is the earlier release. Luckily both versions of the manuals have been scanned and uploaded thanks to work of archivists at archive.org and the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. Here are the Model I and the Model III manuals for your perusal. It’s easy to see that other than the platform mentioned on the front, these two are identical.
Copyright dates are a nebulous thing to go off when it comes to games. A game as popular as Zork would have been reprinted countless times, so it is definitely plausible that these manuals are just later prints. If you look at the disks included with these Radio Shack releases, you’ll typically see a 1981 copyright on Model III disks and a 1982 copyright on Model I disks. Since there are also disks with later dates, one such pictured below, it stands to reason there could be earlier ones as well.
It may look like I’ve just debunked the argument I’ve been making. There’s a 1981 copyright on one of those disks after all. But people have been overlooking something that might seem obvious in retrospect: namely, the fact that this version of Zork is a Radio Shack Catalog game. Thanks to the people over at www.radioshackcatalogs.com we can look over all the issues and even search by item number. Oddly enough, there’s no mention of Zork by its product number until 1982. If you do some more digging you might eventually stumble across the 1982 TRS-80 Computer Catalog which contains some interesting info.
May 1st 1982. Finally a release date that actually makes sense for the Radio Shack Barbarian Zork. It explains why all the manuals have a 1982 copyright. It explains the copyrights on the disks as well when contextualized by other releases. Let us take a closer look at Monty Plays Monopoly, an interesting early Monopoly AI mostly forgotten to time. Coincidentally it also happens to be a game originally published by Personal Software. It mirrors Zork: 1981 copyright on the disk, 1982 on the manual, but it only has one release for the TRS 80 and when booted up shows this title screen. Bedlam, another Radio Shack game scheduled to release a month before the Radio Shack Zork, also follows this pattern. This is why you have to be careful with copyright dates. There’s also a likely explanation as to why the Model III and I disks have different dates that’ll we’ll return to once we have some aditional context.
Surprisingly we also have a ballpark estimate as to about how many copies of the RadioShack Zork were sold thanks to the efforts of Jason Scott and the help of Steve Meretzky. Internal sales data seems to estimate 18,000 copies sold by Tandy in 1982. Radio Shack had exclusive rights to sell the TRS 80 version of Zork I all the way up through the Summer of 1983, so the total sales are probably a bit higher. On the other hand, several long time collectors I’ve spoken to feel this number is an overestimate. It’s safe to assume the majority of those were the Model III version if the frequency the different versions show up by online and for auction is anything to go by.
To bookend the story of Radio Shack’s Barbarian Zork, Infocom seems to have ended up with Radio Shack’s remaining stock of Model I copies at some point. More speculation on my part, but maybe they purchased them from Radio Shack as part of a deal to end that exclusivity contract. In the June 1986 volume of The New Zork Times, by then renamed to The Status Line, there’s a special offer where they threw in a free copy with each mail order purchase. I wonder how many they gave away and am deeply envious.
So where does this misconception come from and why is there so much confusion surrounding Barbarian Zork? To best explain it, let us travel back to 1980 and let me tell a story about Infocom, Personal Software, and a different Barbarian Zork.
There’s already a ton of excellent literature on the creation of Zork and the founding of Infocom so I’ll be withholding all those fascinating details and instead be focusing on how Zork came to market and was sold. Early videogame history isn’t always documented as well as it ought to be, and even first party accounts can end up misremembering some details, so I’ll do my best to be explicit about what can be said for sure.
Let me begin by listing the most important sources we’ll be using. They’re all well worth reading on your own if you have any interest in this topic. One of the most key first party sources about Infocom’s early years is Stu Galley’s writeup, The History of Zork The Final (?) Chapter: MIT, MDL, ZIL, ZIP, in the 1985 September issue of The New Zork Times. Written by one of Infocom’s original founders and just five years after the fact, before time could erode more of the details. There’s also a 2015 article by US Gamer interviewing Dave Lebling, one of the cofounders. The most important second party sources are: Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc., a research paper from 2000 by a group of MIT students (Hector Briceno, Wesley Chao, Andrew Glenn, Stanley Hu, Ashwin Krishnamurthy, and Bruce Tsuchida) alongside Jimmy Maher’s (also known as the Digital Antiquarian) writings on the early history of Infocom.
It is early 1980, Infocom had been founded the year prior and began development on a microcomputer version of Zork with the goal of creating a mass market sellable product. According to Galley:
Zork I first saw the light of day on a DEC-system-20 on which the company was renting time, then on the PDP- 1 1 in Joel’s bedroom. Scott Cutler (who had graduated from the group a couple of years before) used his TRS-80 Model II to create a ZIP for a TRS-80 Model I. As 1980 dawned, Infocom spent a large portion of its bank account to purchase a Model I, and Scott and Marc demonstrated that Zork I was alive in it by starting the game
With a TRS-80 version that at least booted, Infocom was quick to try and find a publisher, famously rebuffed by Microsoft since they already had their own version of Adventure, to Bill Gates’ later regret: he had missed the negotiations and had been a big fan of the original mainframe version. Eventually they settled on Personal Software, the publisher of VisiCalc and Galley says,
Zork I was demonstrated in February 1980. PS agreed in June to publish Zork I and sent us an advance on royalties, our first bonafide income!
Just a month later, in July 1980, Marc Blanc and Stu Galley published an article in Creative Computing called How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine which details the creation and necessity of the Z Machine to fit Zork onto microcomputers. The article contains some of the earliest Zork art, and at the end mentions getting in touch with Personal Software for details about the sales and distribution of the Apple II and TRS 80 versions of Zork. The article was most likely meant to serve as a hype piece for a yet unreleased product, but is nonetheless a fascinating read.
The PDP-11 release of Zork was first announced as a standalone product sometime around September 1980 with one surviving example being that month’s issue of the RT-11 SIG newsletter. I’ve linked the text which was copied into the documentation of a later October PDP-11 release of Dungeon, the game that became Zork. Stu Galley mentions as much:
We had another product in which PS had no interest: the PDP-11 version of Zork I. We sent product announcements to various places, including a newsletter for PDP-11 users, and as a result, the first copy of Zork I sold was a PDP-11 version! It came on an eight-inch floppy disk with a manual that I wrote and Joel had reproduced from a typewritten master.
This is the first personal computer release of the game. How it looked remained a mystery until a copy of the manual went up for auction in 2008. The manual has since been scanned and uploaded, once again thanks to the efforts of Jason Scott. This release sold an extremely limited amount of copies, with Lebling alleging, “that first version was on the DEC PDP-11. I think we sold 20 copies.” To my knowledge, no copy of the accompanying 8" disk has ever been found and I earnestly hope that one day a physical copy of this release that still boots shows up and is archived.
The consensus seems to be that the first copy of this release sold in November. Floyd aka Infidel claims as much on his website infocom-if.org in a writeup dating back to at least 2001, which is also the date Lebling gives in things such as his 2014 GDC talk. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a more concrete source as most of what I can find appears to be based on Floyd’s account and that source remains unknown. This November date, however, is likely solid, and at worst off by one or two months. If we take another look at that documentation for the October release of Dungeon, it mentions that it’s the last source release for the game, so it stands to reason that there was little incentive to actually go and buy the standalone version until the end of October at earliest. The September newsletter also contained claims that Zork is also available for several other popular personal computers. This is still highly unlikely at this point in time.
Let’s get back to the Personal Software release. Infocom was presumably aiming to release Zork in December due to the importance of Christmas sales. The PDP version was complete and the TRS-80 one was well on track and by all accounts by Galley and Lebling, did seem to have come out that December. However the Apple II version was straggling behind. To help remedy this Galley says they brought in an old acquaintance.
Bruce Daniels, the only member of the original Zork team who hadn’t joined Infocom, had accepted a job with Apple and moved to California after graduation. He agreed to create a Z-Machine for the Apple II under contract. Apple II Zork was released in February of 1981
What we can say for certain is that Personal Software took out a big full page ad in December’s issues of Byte and Creative Computing , gracing us with presumably the first appearance of the Barbarian. We can also prove that the Apple II release came to the general market in March 1981, thanks to it hitting the #4 spot in Softalk’s best seller list. It was most likely available directly from Personal Software in a more limited fashion in February. They ran the Barbarian ad again in February’s issue of Byte.
So what did this TRS-80 release look like? Thanks to the help of fellow collector, Nightson, who saved an eBay listing from years past, we have some pictures. If you’re familiar with the Apple II Personal Software release it might look familiar.
This release consists of a manual and a disk stuck inside a small, flimsy and generic Personal Software box. There have been other documented sightings of TRS 80 manuals of this size, one such by C. E. Foreman, a long time Infocom collector of Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe fame, himself. The manual ostensibly looks identical to the Apple II version, but since that one is version specific it stands to reason that there’s slightly different text on the inside — unfortunately, there do not currently appear to be any scans of the TRS-80 manual uploaded at this time so if anyone has one or any leads on one, please consider sharing or archiving it. One also occasionally comes across loose disks that belong with this release. Fortunately the contents have made their way online at some point. The Apple II release is completely identical other than the label on the disk and presumably some text in the manual. One would not be able to tell a sealed copy apart.
So why does almost no one have a copy of the TRS-80 release? Well let’s go back to that 1500 copies number bandied about earlier. This number does seem to be accurate. According to Galley,
Sales began in December, and over the next nine months PS sold about 1500 copies of the TRS-80 version
Apple Zork I proved more popular than the TRS-80 version; PS sold over 6000 copies in eight months.
We don’t even need to rely solely on Galley’s word because we have the sales data for 1981 thanks to Meretzky and Scott. There were 9517 copies of Zork I sold in 1981 and it’s important to note that a chunk of those most likely included Infocom’s own release from the end of that year. The Apple II Personal Software box is typically considered the rarest release of Zork by most collectors and the TRS-80 box must be four times as rare at least.
This would be a decent spot to end this writeup, but there are more releases of Zork to cover and still more to this story. Since Zork I was just a third of the planned adaptation, work on the sequel quickly went underway, but a problem came up when it came to publish Zork II. Galley tells it best,
Zork II was offered to PS in April and licensed in June 1981, ... But we had serious concerns about PS’s commitment, even to Zork I. After an initial rush of advertising, Zork I seemed to join PS’s range of products as just another game. We were eager to make new versions and new titles — including Zork III, “Zork: the Mystery”(Deadline), and “Zorks in Space” (Starcross) — but not if our publisher wasn’t also eager. The fact was that PS was planning to drop its line of entertainment software — since their titles neither sold well over the long term nor brought in enough money to satisfy them — and to change its name to Visicorp in order to identify closely with its “Visi-” series of business products
This did indeed all come to pass with Personal Software becoming Visicorp sometime in early 1982 which begs the serious question of how come the Radio Shack release of Zork from later that year uses the Personal Software branding at all.
Infocom was left at a crossroads and eventually made the bold decision to start publishing their own games. Galley said,
We threw caution to the wind, and hired Mort Rosenthal (who later founded Corporate Software Inc.) as marketing manager, who found a time-shared office in Boston’s venerable Faneuil Hall Marketplace, a time-shared production plant in Randolph, an ad agency in Watertown, an order-taking service in New Jersey, a supplier of disks in California, and so on.
We’ll talk more about Rosenthal later; he ends up being one of the most important characters in the story of the Radio Shack Barbarian Zork. He apparently managed to find all this in just a week. The ad agency was Giardini/Russell who ended up designing much of the classic ads and packaging now so fondly remembered. That disk supplier was Dysan. As a fun aside, it looks like someone recently managed to track down the original artist for the brick Zork logo, a Boston-based artist, Norman Adams. Bonus points if you spot his signature in the ad below. And what an ad it is! Galley said of it,
We announced Zork II and our new role as publisher with a Christmas promotion as eye-catching as we could afford.
In the preceding month, as part of this separation from Personal Software, Infocom also bought back all the remaining copies of the Apple II Personal Software release. In the words of Al Vezza, another cofounder who went on to become CEO, from an interview summarized in the MIT paper and Galley respectively,
In November 1981, both companies announced an “amicable separation” after Infocom decided to buy back the remaining inventory and the rights back to Zork. Infocom pooled some $32,000 between the members of the company, and hauled the misrepresented boxes of Zork back to Al Vezza’s house. Vezza’s children and Infocom employees then threw out everything but the disks that contained Zork.
We also bought PS’s entire inventory of Zork I (except the TRS-80 version, which they still wanted to sell) to prevent them from “dumping” it on the market at bargain prices and lowering the public’s image of “Zork” in general.
This is all well documented and has caused some amount of speculation amongst collectors in regards to whether some of these copies made it back to the market. You occasionally see copies of the Apple II Barbarian Zork consisting of just the manual and a plastic baggie. It is incredibly unlikely that these were ever sold directly by Infocom. These were almost assuredly repackaged by the computer stores themselves to save on space or because the Personal Software box was so fragile.
With Infocom’s own release of Zork already available for order and due to release in just a month, it’s almost impossible they’d try and sell a competing version with the cover art they so disliked. Vezza also specifically mentions the manuals being tossed. But there’s yet another reason that it is unlikely, regarding something I haven’t been focusing on so far, the software itself. There are a lot of versions of Zork and thankfully most of them have been preserved and archived and uploaded thanks to folks like 4am and Jason Scott. Andrew Plotkin maintains a rather comprehensive list of all versions of all Infocom games ever released over at The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog.
While there’s no direct proof as of yet it seems extremely likely that release 2 corresponds with the TRS-80 Model I Personal Software release. Thanks to the work of 4am we can also confidently say that release 5 is the Apple II Personal Software release. Release 15 corresponds to the first Apple II release self-published by Infocom, which can also be confirmed thanks to Stephane Racle. I believe the Radio Shack release corresponds to release 25, though it would be nice to get verification on that and to see if there’s potentially a difference between the Model I and III versions. Zork went through a lot of changes between these releases and one stands out. For those less familiar with the game, the artist’s studio you come across near the beginning of the game contains a note pinned to the wall. Releases 2 and 5 both contain this text:
Whereas it was replaced with this note starting with release 15:
The story of this note and it’s signifcance is told here by Maher. And if you’re at all curious the map and hints mentioned here have miraculously been preserved over at Racle’s incredible website. If you’ve read a little about the story and context, that PO box was most likely defunct by November 1981. There’s no way they would have been selling a version of Zork with this note inside or with a Personal Software label on the floppy at this point time. If any of the Personal Software floppies were in fact reused they were rewritten and relabeled.
What Infocom did sell was this:
These released in December of 1981, a year after the Personal Software version. It’s possible they released at slightly different times but that and the sales numbers for these are so far out of the scope of this bloated writeup that someone else will have to do the research.
Occasionally people will refer to the Personal Software release as the “pre-Infocom” version and the blisterpacks as the first Infocom release. This is imprecise language as Infocom was already incorporated at the time and are credited as the developers in the Personal Software release’s manual. Both versions are by Infocom, the first was published by Personal Software and the second was self-published. There is no Zork pre-Infocom except for Dungeon.
We’ve made it to early 1982; Deadline, Infocom’s detective noir follow up to Zork, is releasing in March and sales for Zork I and II are stellar. Now’s when we cut back to Mort Rosenthal. According to Maher,
They also secured a fellow named Mort Rosenthal as marketing manager. He lasted less than a year with Infocom, getting himself fired when he overstepped his authority to offer Infocom’s games to Radio Shack at a steep discount that would get them into every single store.
The Radio Shack Barbarian Zork seems to have gotten poor Mort fired. It’ll likely be difficult to ever learn more, since the man himself unfortunately passed away in 2015. Somehow the negotiations went so poorly that at the cost of getting a Radio Shack Catalog release, a no doubt lucrative proposition, the Barbarian cover art Infocom so disliked was brought back and Personal Software branding put all over the release even though that company no longer existed anymore after the VisiCorp rebrand. It also as previously mentioned seems to have given Radio Shack exclusive rights over the TRS 80 release of Zork I, which I suspect also didn’t sit well with the rest of the company. What a stunningly bizarre and probably upsetting release to many at Infocom.
The only outstanding question is why the Model I and III Radio Shack floppies have different dates. I speculate that Model III and CoCo, Tandy’s color successor to the TRS-80, software was much more of a priority at that point. So the Model I version probably missed that original May release date by a couple months and by then they had updated the label. If one looks closely at the label, one might notice that the Model III version says licensed by Personal Software whereas the Model I version says licensed by VisiCorp. It is often thrown around that Personal Software rebranded to VisiCorp in early 1982, but that’s the kind of thing we can check. While the company name was registered end of 1981, the rename seems to have happened in July that next year. So we can likely further date the Model I release to July of that year at its earliest.
By the end of 1983, Infocom had the rights back and published this release of Zork for the TRS-80, now in a re-designed fatter blisterpack. This whole saga coincidentally explains why there are no skinny blisterpack versions of Zork I, Radio Shack had exclusivity during that period.
So why has there been all this confusion? This mix-up seems to date back as far as twenty years and probably quite a bit longer. The rarity of the original TRS-80 Personal Software release and the ambiguity of referring to these releases as the “Barbarian Zork” release have both factored heavily into this. Even many of the original developers have referred to the Radio Shack version as the Personal Software one or just Barbarian Zork on numerous occasions. All of these versions, even the early blister packs, are incredibly rare collector’s items at this point in time which makes doing this kind of historical research difficult.
For visual clarity I made a timeline of the releases of Zork I, pictured below:
To properly sanitize the language surrounding these releases, I’d recommend that from here on out they be referred to by their publisher. The 1980 Personal Software Zork, the 1981 Infocom Zork, and the 1982 Radio Shack Zork. Thanks for reading and for anyone who made it all the way to the end, I hope you’re not likely to be eaten by a Grue even on the darkest of days.
Works Cited
1982 TRS-80 Computer Catalog (RSC-7) Courtesy of radioshackcatalogs.com
4AM’s Zork Crack Courtesy of 4AM and archive.org
Article on eBay auction of the PDP-11 release Courtesy of escapistmagazine.com
Artist Info Courtesy of Reddit user commondivisor
Byte December 1980 Vol 5, No 12 Courtesy of Byte and archive.org
Creative Computing December 1980 Vol 6, No 12 Courtesy of Creative Computing and archive.org
Creative Computing July 1980 Vol 6, No 7 Courtesy of Creative Computing and archive.org
Dave Lebling Interview by Jaz Rignall Courtesy of usgamer.net and archive.org
Dave Lebling’s 2014 GDC talk Courtesy of Dave Lebling, GDC, and youtube.com
Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc. by Hector Briceno, Wesley Chao, Andrew Glenn, Stanley Hu, Ashwin Krishnamurthy, and Bruce Tsuchida Courtesy of archive.org
Infocom Sales Data from the Infocom Cabinet Courtesy of Steve Meretzy, Jason Scott and archive.org
Monty Plays Monopoly Disk and Gameplay Courtesy of mobygames.com
Monty Plays Monopoly Manual Courtesy of archive.org
Mort Rosenthal Obituary Courtesy of crn.com
Personal Software Zork Apple II Manual Courtesy of apple.asimov.net
Pre-ZUG Map and Hints Courtesy of Stephane Racle and gue.cgwmuseum.org
Radio Shack Zork TRS Model I Manual Courtesy of archive.org
Radio Shack Zork TRS Model III Manual Courtesy of mocagh.org
RT-11 Sig September Newsletter Courtesy of web.mit.edu
Softalk June 1981 Vol 1, No 6 Courtesy of Softalk and archive.org
The Digital Antiquarian’s Series on the History of Infocom by Jimmy Maher
The History of Zork The Final (?) Chapter: MIT, MDL, ZIL, ZIP by Stu Galley Courtesy of The New Zork Times and archive.org
The New Zork Times Vol II, No 3 Courtesy of archive.org
The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog Courtesy of Andrew Plotkin and eblong.com
The Status Line Vol V, No 2 Courtesy of archive.org
VisiCorp Incorporation Date Courtesy of corp.sec.state.ma.us
Ye Olde Infocomme Shop Report by C. E. Foreman Courtesy of yois.if-legends.org
Zork I computer shop release Courtesy of blackgate.com and Bruce “Spike” McPhee
Zork I cover Courtesy of me3D31337 and mobygames.com
Zork II ad Courtesy of retrogamingaus.com
