The Zork Library Forum

I watched the 1983 movie War Games today.  It may be too old for some of you guys, but was kind of cool to see some of the stuff that qualified for state-of-the-art at the time.  Things like 1200 baud modems with accoustic couplers, monochrome, text-only computer screens, 8 inch floppy disks and hacking into school and military computers.

But what really grabbed my attention happened near the end.

The war games computer 'learns' that some games are unwinable and eventually evaluates that "The only winning move is not to play."  This line was, essentially, the whole point of the movie.

Now, I don't know about you, but this sounds an awful lot like a line from Zork: Grand Inquisitor.  Recall, in Z:GI that if you cast the 'simplification' spell on the DoubleFunucci rules, the rules are reduced to the simple phrase, "The only way to win is not to play."  

Although the Zork text adventures were out at this time, Z:GI didn't come out until '97, I think.  Obviously, War Games didn't steal this line from Zork, since War Games predates Z:GI by 14 years.  But what about the other way around?  Was the line in Z:GI influenced by the line in War Games, or is it a complete coincidence?  

On the one hand, War Games was one of the first 'hacker' movies and very popular among the computer literate of the time.  Very likely, the authors of Z:GI saw it.  What do you think?

Could be, could not be.

I myself have thought of jokes before that, as far as I knew, were quite original until I discovered that they already existed, and someone had thought of them before. That would be a believable enough situation with this one. A descriptor for an impossibly hard game--a few people are bound to think of something along those lines.

On the other hand, Zork games have always contained the odd reference to something outside of the games--there's The Land of Froon in Beyond Zork (the Wizard of Oz), the cakes in Zork 2 (Alice in Wonderland) and the comfy chair in Zork Zero ("NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!!"), to name a few.