Zorgon

History

Tim Stryker developed the sci-fi multiuser adventure game Fazuul (and several variants) in 1984, and licensed it to a system called EnterNet, which was a multi-user dial-up entertainment system on custom software. In 1986, a year after he founded Galacticomm, he adapted Fazuul to The Major BBS. Unfortunately, details of the license to EnterNet held up his ability to do anything with his creation. He turned to creating the Peyennuu fantasy adventure games with Scott Brinker (Quest for Magic, et al.), but never gave up on Fazuul.

In 1987, the world of Galacticomm was quite small, limited to Galacticomm itself and a very tight group of South Florida-based third party developers like Moonshae Telecomm and Logicom. Often these developers contributed to the Galacticomm code, too. Such was the case with Logicom's Don Arnel, who had even briefly worked FOR Galacticomm.

The details are currently unclear, but Don Arnel was able to develop his first, and only, multi-user adventure game Zorgon based upon the series of Fazuul based games by Stryker. He began work in mid 1987 on the game. The game is quite similar to the Fazuul games; Zorgon's release allowed Fazuul to make its way to The Major BBS in some form. Fazuul itself finally made its way to the platform several years later.

In 1997, the rights to Zorgon were sold to Soft Arts.

Game Information

Zorgon is a multi-player adventure game set on a desolate alien planet. Players compete in a science fiction world of laser beams and robots. It features morethan 250 rooms and over 500 commands. Users can even build their own devices within the game.

Gameplay

Gameplay within Zorgon is fairly typical of text "adventure" games (now more commonly called interactive fiction games) like Zork, Colossal Cave, etc; and MUD games, like Dungeon, Rogue, etc. Players issue simple verb-noun command pairs, such as "north", "get object", "mix object1 object2", etc. Players can interact with other players in the game, as well.