Zorked: ScummVM Adds Nemesis & Grand Inquisitor

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

That crummy shack is where I live after being fired for referencing the wrong Zork game, blithely thinking "Hey, that's close enough. Yeah, Zork, sure, people will get that. Grues and all that right." All I wanted to do was write some vaguely entertaining intro to a post about how ScummVM has added support for Zork Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor but now I live in a boarded-up shameshack. Good job, lazy.

Nemesis and Grand Inquisitor came a fair few years after ye olde text-based Zorks, with Myst-ish pre-rendered 3D worlds to explore and FMV cutscenes to gawp at. They do both sorta work on Windows still - you can buy them on GOG - but running on ScummVM avoids a few issues with modern versions of Windows and makes them playable on Mac, Linux, Android, and all sorts of other operating systems too.

This is probably the point where I should link to RPS pal Richard Cobbett's fond look back at Grand Inquisitor. There. Maybe that minor act will save me from being fired.

Support for this pair of Zorks is now in ScummVM's daily builds, which will become proper release versions one day.

Given that Zork Nemesis developers Zombie Studios have very recently shut down, this is fine time for one of their earliest games to find eternal undeath.