Grue (monster) - Zork Lore

Zork Lore

The first mention of grues in the Zork games is the line

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Further investigation reveals more about them:

> what is a grue?

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

Grues were invented to force the player to solve light-related puzzles. If the player attempts to continue moving through a dark place rather than returning to a lit area or activating a light source, there is a high probability he or she will be caught and eaten by a grue. In later games, in certain situations, it is also possible to be eaten by a grue as a consequence of only standing in the dark. Zork's predecessor, Colossal Cave Adventure, used bottomless pits to achieve the same result, but when early versions of Zork adopted this practice, it was realized that pits were appearing in unlikely places such as the attic of a house, and with no corroborating evidence such as holes in the room directly below.

Grues have been featured in each of the Zork games (with the possible exception of Enchanter) and many other of Infocom's games, becoming a company trademark or in-joke, often referred to with the stock phrases of "slavering fangs", "razor-sharp claws" and "horrible gurgling noises". The science fiction title Starcross reuses both the "You are likely to be eaten by a grue" line and the grue's description. Additionally, Planetfall makes reference to grues having been unwittingly taken from their home planet (which is implied to be the world on which Zork takes place) and introduced to Earth by the alien ship in Starcross, then spread around the galaxy alongside man and become a universal pest for human civilizations. The term is also mentioned in other contexts, such as a racehorse named "Lurking Grue" in the murder mystery game Suspect.

As time went on, the games allowed closer views of grues — Wishbringer allows the player to stumble upon a baby grue and look at it before its parents return. Zork: The Undiscovered Underground, released 12 years later, lets the player character see a grue and states that he/she is the first to do so. Spellbreaker had the magical plane of darkness almost entirely populated by grues and forced the player to survive by using magic to take the form of one of the beasts.

One of the repeated references in Zork's backstory was to an ancient king who directly fought grues in combat; this feat would not be repeated until the interactive fiction/RPG hybrid Beyond Zork, which allows a player of a sufficiently level and with certain items to kill attacking grues. Zork: The Undiscovered Underground featured an extended reference to a line in Zork III about "a whole convention of grues" by having the player infiltrate a literal grue convention, complete with lectures, entertainment and souvenirs.

That game was the first to give a detailed description of how grues looked, having the player disguise himself as a grue after seeing one and noting that it had a "fish-mouthed head, razor-sharp claws and glowing fur all over". (The reference to "glowing fur" appears to be a mistaken interpretation of Sorcerer describing a grue glowing after a light spell has been cast on it — although Spellbreaker does mention that grues' eyes give off a very small amount of light that lets them navigate in darkness.) However, an actual illustration of a grue had been seen previously, in one of Steve Meretzky's Zork gamebooks, which included a section where the protagonists see a grue face-to-face before being eaten by it, presumably as a way to make the book attractive to Zork fans. Presumably these are not the only instances in the Zork games when grues have been seen — one event in Sorcerer has the player finding a Frobozz Magic Company secret prototype "anti-grue kit" containing a grue costume which the player can use to remain among grues unharmed. (The player in Zork: The Undiscovered Underground replicates this feat, albeit imperfectly.)

There is a running gag of mostly failed attempts to find other means of protection than light against grues, most famously in Zork II where a can of Frobozz Magic Grue Repellent was included as a nearly useless red herring. In Zork III, the Magic Grue Repellent functions more like the player might expect, and lasts for several turns.

The power of light as a Achilles' heel for grues is inconsistently given — some games imply that grues find ordinary levels of light painful but can nonetheless survive them; Zork: The Undiscovered Underground has a grue caught in the light spontaneously combust; and in the Zork Trilogy, the player carries around a sword that glows blue when near danger, but grues can kill a player even when it is glowing brightly.

The modern graphical adventure games in the Zork series continue references to grues, such as gurgling and growling sound effects. A possible parody of the concept appeared in one puzzle in Return To Zork, in which turning the light off in a hotel bedroom creates the danger of a grue attack; the only solution is to place a piece of lightly glowing rock on the nightstand, providing only so much light that it is still possible to sleep. Zork Nemesis continues a running gag about failed attempts to capture or domesticate grues by including a book with an illustration captioned "The Grue In Its Natural Habitat" (a blank black square). Zork Grand Inquisitor added "Grue, Fire, Water", a variant of Rock, Paper, Scissors wherein "Grue drinks water, water douses fire, and fire scares grue."