On 03-27-97 VINCE WOO wrote to KENNETH NEWMAN... 
 
 VW> What is Kroz??? Does it have anything to do with the code dnkroz? 
 
        THe code is in honour of Kroz, I imagine. 
 
        Kroz was tecnically the first Apogee game, though Scott 
        had put out Supernova and the Star Trek trivia games 
        first, but Kroz was the first one to come out under the 
        name Apogee. It was released as shareware, but was also 
        put out on a disk magazine called Big Blue Disk put out 
        by Softdisk, which gave it a very widespread 
        distribution. As a result many of us were hooked. Soon 
        there were Kroz sequels and thus the legend was born. 
 
        It was intended as an hommage to the text game, Zork, 
        hence the name Kroz, which is just Zork spelled 
        backwards. Anyway, it was intended to covert the text 
        adventure to graphic adventure, using basically ansi 
        graphics, like with Hack/Nethack/Amulet of Yendor/etc, 
        but using ansi so it looked really good on CGA. It 
        combined all the excitement of a great arcade game with 
        some of the puzzles and tricks and traps associated with 
        less exciting games. It was very addictive and still 
        plays well, all these years later. 
 
        Incidentally, it was also the inspiration for Epic's 
        first game, ZZT, which was different enough not to be a 
        ripoff, and just as much fun. This one live on since it 
        comes with an editor so that fanatics can continue to 
        come up with new ZZT games of their own, long after Epic 
        has forgotten it ever existed. 
 
        The Kroz and ZZT games are two of the strongest arguments 
        I can think of for never throwing old XT's onto the 
        junkheap. They were and still are a lot of fun. 
 
        Broussard's early games, Arctic Adventure and Pharoah's 
        Tomb, were also a lot of fun, if you're going to be 
        digging these up. 
 
                                Cheers, 
                                Kenneth 
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