I loved playing Zork. And there’s always been a special place in my heart for grues. So naturally I made my 404 page into a text adventure toy with grues. Give it a try. Do I win the prize for geekiest 404 page ever?

It’s Javascript. It understands a handful of verbs and nouns (and one magic word) but it isn’t a real Z-machine interpreter by a long stretch. Coding it reminded me of creating my first text adventure game in BASIC on an Apple II.

About 1/3rd of the Javascript is used to animate the grue. I wrote it so that I could instantiate multiple grues on the page but ended up with just one because I couldn’t be bothered to solve the problem of grues overlapping. I drew the grue—quite proud of that, actually. Turned out nicely. I was inspired by “G” from The Geek ABCs (headinjurytheater.com)—a very lovely grue.