The Zork Library Forum

Email from the "Grand Wizard" on May 24th 2011:

It is with a heavy heart we announce that Legends of Zork will be closing its doors to adventurers from noon BST (GMT +1) Tuesday 31st May 2011.

We all know that development work has been scarce of late: We have tried to find leeway within a work intensive schedule to devote some time to fixing the issues in the game; We have tried to find time to create new content for the community; But on the whole we have been unable to undertake any major work on the game.

As we showed towards the end of last year, we are not happy to let older games gather dust and run on autopilot. We’d rather treat the community still playing, the hardy souls, with an honesty and integrity that matches their commitment to the game they love.

We have been extremely busy developing our newest game Utopia Kingdoms for Facebook, along with some other exciting new titles, and as a result we have not been able to put the amount of development time we would like into Legends of Zork. As we cannot foresee a time in the future when this situation will change we have reluctantly made the decision to close the game.

The payment system has been turned off in advance to prevent players from investing in a game soon to close. However if you have purchased coconuts and cannot spend them all in the time remaining we will be happy to transfer these to the equivalent value in the corresponding currency for our new Facebook game Utopia Kingdoms, if you submit a ticket to the support team.

We have enjoyed having you all as part of the Jolt Community and hope for many of you this is not goodbye but ‘see you later’, until we meet again in another game, on another board. We would like to thank you for your time, your patience and your understanding.

We know that you will have many questions, and we will do our best to answer them all for you in this thread.

Sincerely,
Jolt Online Gaming

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I played last, last week... and although we ALL saw this coming, I didn't want to have to see it. I really liked this game and was hoping for new things to be introduced. I left it shortly after the closure of Utopia Kingdoms web game (around Nov 2010), due to everyone on the forum knowing that the time for LoZ was sure to come as well (I'd visit often but didn't play daily though). Some tears spring to my eyes, but it's time to move on guys. I just hope that Activision some day decides to do something with the Zork lore. Deeply saddened.

PS Although my brother and I are distant and don't talk due to disagreements, I will never forget HE was the one who introduced me to Return To Zork. And that game brings me the best memories I can ever remember from spending time with him.

Liliana from PA

It's too bad. I've been playing a little again this weekend. Hopefully Activision will do something else with Zork soon.

I really can't believe that Jolt messed up so bad. Really, the first official game of Zork since 1997, that's 12 years! How can they mess it up this bad? The game itself needed much improvement BUT finishing the release of those two fanucci cards would have been a great improvement. That alone would have brought the trust of those diehard Zork enthusiasts. But most importantly, at least the game would have been complete. They didn't even try! How can they desecrate the history of Zork this way, by abandoning it the way they did; and left it unfinished?

That wouldn't have been so hard, and of course more avatars every now and then, then more holiday themed weapons would have kept people interested for years... they have no idea the power pixels can have in the majority of players. I dunno how people feel about Jolt, but they have done nothing but fail and fail over and over with their games. I've never seen a company closing so many online games before. They're going to have to straighten up someday or people will lose more trust in them.

Liliana

I imagine if they would have just strained their resources a bit to get that Dungeon implemented (which is seems that it was almost 100% complete), then they would have kept around a massive herd of people.

I hadn't kept up with Legends of Zork much over the past year or so. There was a dungeon planned? Now that would have been something that might have made me play it more.