Sadly the Zork hype has died down in the past 15 years or so. Equally the one for text based games (some people like me for example were never too fond of the text based). A game like the one you speak of, will most likely attract the older audience or true die hard Zork fans. I am a semi-die-hard fan, but the only text based game I passed was Zork 1 and it was overly exhausting, using walkthroughs at the time.
Sadly there are LESS die-hard Zork fans than I thought. Such thing can be more than proven when a game like Legends of Zork had such bad reviews and wasn't seen by "Zork fans" as a promising, possible way to spark the Zork interest (from Activision) to make a killer commercial release of a Zork game.
Truth be told, fan-base is everything in a game. If enough hype had been raised with the release of LoZ, Activision would have responded. Sadly there was nothing but negative criticism, that rather than induce the company to work harder to make it better, it just got the company to close the game instead. I still believe that Jolt Online were lazy, there is no doubt about it. Activision is not as lazy, but I remember them dropping the Zork Grand Inquisitor support around the year 2000-01 due to the fact that many people really didn't inquire much about it.
Of course most of the public doesn't care for a "quiet" adventure game that requires solving puzzles and lots of thinking... they opt to play something that's violent or something that has to do with celebrities: Guitar Hero, Fallout 3, Half-Life, Oblivion, Call of Duty, Super Smash Bros. etc.
I do wish you luck though, I am trying to get Sheepshaver working in my Windows 7 PC, and at the same time hoping to get Zork Grand Inquisitor to work as well. I love classic games. I still need to install DOSBOX that I used to run flawlessly in my old Powerbook G4 and it's a piece of cake compared to the ones mentioned above. How promising are my chances to get them running? So far not that much.
