Frigid River in Zork I versus "Dungeon" Zork

[Jeroen]

I am playing through the Dungeon, mainframe version of Zork. Terrific fun, but I do have a bit of a mapping issue. It is about how the Frigid River runs after Aragain Falls.

According to the description in Zork I, the "Canyon View" location is on the west wall of a canyon, and the Frigid River runs through it. The player climbs down from there, and eventually happens upon the rainbow, which eventually provides the connection to the other shore on the eastern side of the river. The river flows southwards.

In Dungeon, however, "Canyon View" is on the south wall of the canyon. The Frigid River still flows from the north or northwest southwards. From the Canyon View, the player climbs down and again encounters the rainbow which now crosses over to the west in the vicinity of the Aragain Falls. My question is, where does the river go downstream from here? The well-known map that was published in the "DEC Professional" journal and Dave Lebling's own map seem to disagree on this issue. The former seems to move (or force) the canyon to the west of the White House (despite the layout of the underlying part of the GUE), while on the latter, the canyon -- and the river -- seems to simply end rather abruptly.

Any thoughts on this?

[Nowhere Gaming]

When the game was split into three parts (in order to make it fit on floppy disks of the time) they had to change a few things in order to keep the game play contained to the area in which each game took place. This meant removing rooms and puzzles in some areas as well as changing the layout or others which allowed for mistakes made in Dungeon to be corrected. The Frigid River fell victim to this process. It doesn't make sense in Dungeon with the description but I don't think the Imps were thinking the description through. Seems to me like they fixed it in Zork I.

[Jeroen]

Thanks, that sounds quite plausible. In the meantime I have played through the game and made this map as I went along.

[Nowhere Gaming]

VERY nice!