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

What do you do when it's 10 below zero outside with a windchill factor of -40 Fahrenheit? Play through Infocom's Zork series, what else!

Sure I ventured outside during Wichita winters, I even made it as far as the lake near our house on Mainsgate Road where my brother and I saw a duck whose feet had been stuck to the frozen water. We returned chilled to the bone with meteorites of snow adhered to the insides of our pant legs.

It all started in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door and in the quiet, cold office of our finished basement. I imagined the trophy case that was intended to contain all the treasures in the game actually sat in the family room just on the other side of the acoustic tiled wall, and the storage room and my room comprised our own Great Underground Empire.

I spent many cold mornings staring at the monochrome green CRT puzzling out the mysteries of Zork, the individual letters devolving into individual pixels, then engulfing my entire field of view until I arrived at my next move. I may have gotten help from Infocom's own hint books, but regardless, I finally solved Zork III and actually printed out a transcript of the play session in the smallest possible font on our dot-matrix printer for extended bathroom review.