Call Of Duty ➔ Zork

Activision has had a long time to get as dreadful as it is today. It was created in 1979, more than four decades old, and along the way has gruesomely absorbed all manner of other developers and publishers. One such acquisition was Infocom, the early masters of the text adventure, which Activision bought in 1986. (And then shut down in 1989, because twas ever thus.) In buying it, Activision gained the rights to the classic Zork series of adventure games, and has kept them ever since.

So it is that if you play either Call of Duty: Black Ops or Black Ops Cold War, and use the computer terminal in the East Berlin CIA safehouse, you can type “zork” into its text prompt and play the entire 1980 game.

Zork was first created at MIT in 1977, played on the DEC PDP-10 mainframe computer, its four programmers then going on to found Infocom in ‘79. It was first commercially released in 1980, then ported to various home computers throughout the 80s, along with its sequels, each featuring a mixture of the burgeoning dungeon mastering of the era along with a good dose of humor via its nonsensical FrobozzCo products.

But most importantly, it’s fun to imagine a die-hard CoD player stumbling on this, and getting completely lost in its text-based imaginary world.

Oh, and I should probably add that the further you get in the game, the more other ancient Activision games appear on the arcade cabinet in the same location. On there you’ve got Pitfall!, Pitfall 2, Barnstorming, Boxing, Chopper Commando, Enduro, Fishing Derby, Grand Prix, Kaboom!, and River Raid