Metroidvania Works #01: Zork [1977/1980, Infocom]

It's been a long time coming, but the first episode of Metroidvania Chronicles is here. We begin before the beginning, turning back the hands of game design to 1977's text adventure Zork. What does a text-based adventure have to do with Metroid-style platform action games, you may well wonder, and this episode aims to answer that question in as interesting a fashion as possible, given how deeply unsuited to video the text adventure genre is.