Hello!

Some of you probably know that Zork 1-3 - and perhaps others - have previously been distributed freely (I don't know the finer details about the legal state/availability of those games anymore) by Activision in a .z5 format; the z-machine files could be run on various interpreters and you could move them to whatever device you had - be it old-ass palm handhelds or modern iPhones - and now that I out of... I don't know, respect, bought the anthology off GoG, I was surprised when the games were installed with no .z5 files.

To make a long story short; I'm 17 and have no experience of playing these games when they were new; I have just assumed that these .z5 files were how the games have always been distributed, along with some sort of interpreter compiled for the OS - C64, DOS, whatever - is that not the case? The reason for me asking is, of course, because I want to be able to play Zork on any device I will ever own. Because I'm crazy and care about such things.

I know this post is badly written and a grammatical mess. I hope it's cool! Thanks in advance for anyone that can enlighten me in these confused times.

For all intents and purposes, this is exactly right. Some very pedantic minutia is possible in describing the differences between versions, but...

And yes, the version available on GOG is basically disk images of the original DOS release, so the relevant files are all .DAT files.

Most interpreters such as Winfrotz/Gargoyle/iFiction etc. will run the .DAT files with no problem, so...No worries about playing where ever you want as long as an interpreter is available.