Grue (monster)
Encyclopedia
A grue is a fictional predator that dwells in the dark. The word was first used in modern times as a fictional predator in Jack Vance
's Dying Earth
universe (described as being part "ocular bat", part "unusual hoon" and part man).
Dave Lebling
introduced a similar monster, whose name was borrowed from Vance's grues, into the interactive fiction computer game Zork
, published by Infocom
. Zork's grues fear light and are ravenous devourers of adventurers, making it impossible to explore the game's dark areas without a light source. The grue subsequently appeared in other Infocom games.
Due to Zork's prominent position in hacker history and lore, its grues have served as models for monsters in many subsequent games, such as roguelike
games and MUD
s.
Further investigation will reveal more about their nature:
This warning is not to be taken lightly. 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. Originally, grues were not a threat as long as one remained still and didn't leave one's location, but in later games it has been possible, in certain situations, to be eaten by a grue simply by waiting around in the dark. While the juveniles are almost transparent, adults are dark brown and covered with a gelatinous sheath.
Grues were invented to limit players' options when faced with unlit areas. If a player should attempt to blunder about in the darkness in hopes of achieving whatever goal first brought them there, the presence of grues ensures that they will fail, forcing the player to solve any light-related puzzles first. 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 elsewhere (such as holes in the ceiling or floor in the room directly below). Thus, Dave Lebling
envisioned a wandering, light-fearing monster that could do the job of the bottomless pits, and, taking the name from Vance's work as having the right connotations, introduced grues in the next version of Zork. The version update document made a humorous reference to the "dungeon maintainers" painstakingly filling up the bottomless pits and restocking the dungeon with grues. Years later, the Zork prequel game, Zork Zero
, would feature the protagonist doing exactly that: forced to use a magic device to seal up the realm's bottomless pits that are blocking his or her path, he or she unwittingly forces out the myriad colonies of grues that have been nesting there, leaving them to wander the underground caverns searching for food.
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, replacing the word "adventurer" with the current job title of the protagonist. 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 subsequently spread around the galaxy alongside man and become a universal pest for human civilizations. The term crops up as an in-joke in other contexts as well, such as a racehorse named "Lurking Grue" in the modern-day murder mystery Suspect
.
Much is made of the idea that grues have such an aversion to light that no one has ever seen one and it is impossible to gain a firsthand physical description of one and that, conversely, grues are such formidable predators that light is the only possible means of avoiding them. Neither of these ideas held absolutely true throughout the entire Infocom line of games. For instance, the game Sorcerer, which provided a wide variety of humorous responses to creative uses of magic spells, allowed the player to cast the Frotz spell on a grue, causing a "horrible, multi-fanged creature" from just outside the range of vision to run through the room "gurgling in agony and tearing at its fur". The game similarly provided a potion that granted the ability to see in darkness as a trap for players who forgot that the main purpose of a light source in the Zork games is not to preserve one's own vision but to repel grues; taking the night vision potion and turning off one's light source results in the almost immediate encounter with, and subsequent devouring by, a grue. Near the end of the game, it is revealed that the main villain's plot for conquering the world involves manufacturing an army of light-resistant grues using a conveniently provided Frobozz Magic Company device.
As time went on the games became increasingly bold in their treatment of grues — Wishbringer
allows the player to stumble upon a baby grue and get a good look at it before its parents return (described as a "horrid little beast with red eyes and slavering fangs"). (Zork: The Undiscovered Underground
, a freeware
game that was released 12 years later, states that the character in that game is the first person to see a grue.) Spellbreaker
, which had the player traveling through magical planes that represented various elements
and principle
s, had the 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 the ancient king Entharion the Wise and the legendary blade Grueslayer, which he used to directly fight grues in combat; this feat would not be repeated until the interactive fiction/RPG
hybrid Beyond Zork
, which allows a player who has advanced sufficiently in level and acquired certain items to boldly walk into the dark and kill grues that attack. (This feat required the acquisition of the Pheehelm, a device that boosted the player's intelligence and allowed him/her to sense the grues' movements telepathically without seeing them.) Finally, the modern-day game Zork: The Undiscovered Underground created as a promotion for Zork Grand Inquisitor
featured an extended reference to a line in Zork III about "a whole convention of grues" in a certain location, 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 light-hating grues themselves glowing 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, although in an obscure source — one of Steve Meretzky
's Zork gamebooks purposely 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 "anti-grue kit" (admittedly a secret, experimental prototype) that contains a grue costume, with which the player can don and travel among grues unharmed. (The player in Zork: The Undiscovered Underground replicates this feat, albeit imperfectly.)
This is part of the running gag of a series of mostly failed attempts to find some sort of alternate means of protection against grues in the event one's light source fails, most famously in Zork II where a can of Frobozz Magic Grue Repellent was included as a red herring — mostly useless, since it would only last for one game turn after one's light source expired, during which the player couldn't see his location anyway. (In some versions of the game, however, it can be used as an alternate solution to one puzzle.) In Zork III the Magic Grue Repellent functions more like the player might expect, and lasts for several turns.
The actual reason light acts as such a potent Achilles' heel
for grues is inconsistently given — some games imply that grues find levels of light ordinary for humans to be intolerably, blindingly painful but can nonetheless survive it (such as in Planetfall, where an obviously grue-like creature exists in a lit laboratory, "squinting and cursing at the light" — although the laboratory contains other creatures that are clearly mutants, so it is possible that this grue is simply a mutant that is able to survive in a lighted area.) Zork: The Undiscovered Underground goes to the other extreme, having a grue caught in the light spontaneously combust
on the spot. This latter explanation seems closer to the canon established by the main Infocom game series, since in Spellbreaker, if the player is shapeshifted into a grue and remains in a lit area for too long the light eventually kills him/her (and it is implied that the amount of light to which he or she is exposed is so faint as to be invisible to human eyes). However, in the Zork Trilogy, the player carries around an Elven sword that glows whenever he or she is near danger, the glow being described as a faint blue glow (when one room away from a dangerous creature) or a bright blue glow (when in the same room). The sword glows in response to the proximity of any dangerous creature, whether a grue or of some other type, and grues can still kill a player when his sword is glowing, even very brightly; therefore, either a) there is variation between games as to how much light a grue can safely encounter or b) only light having one or more properties that the sword's light does not exhibit (e.g., a wavelength/frequency/color within a specific range not including that of the sword's light) is harmful to grues.
The question of how grues are able to survive undetected at all without being trapped in a dead end by a wandering human with a lantern has often been debated by fans, attributed either to their ability to travel through tunnels humans cannot see nor use or to use something akin to Dungeons & Dragons
"shadow jump" ability.
The modern graphical adventure games in the Zork series continue references to grues, with gurgling and growling grue sound effects audible in most shadowy or gloomy places and many points at which players can meet a gruesome death by wandering without light. A possible parody of the concept appeared in one puzzle in Return To Zork
, in which the player was in danger of being attacked by a grue after turning the light off in their own bedroom in a hotel; the only solution is to place a piece of lightly glowing, magical rock called Illumynite on the nightstand, providing just enough light to ward off grues while still making it possible to sleep. The in-jokes continue as well, with Zork Nemesis continuing a running gag about failed attempts to capture or domesticate grues by including in a library a book, "Interview with a Grue", that sported an illustration captioned "The Grue In Its Natural Habitat" (a blank black square). Zork Grand Inquisitor added to grue trivia the idea of the game "Grue, Fire, Water", a variant of Rock, Paper, Scissors
wherein "Grue drinks water, water douses fire, and fire scares grue."
, an evil being called an "Ur-grue" is introduced as the primary villain. Though similar in name, the Ur-grue is significantly different from the classic grue, being more akin to an evil god of darkness than a simple predatory monster.
Again, Scandinavian and German language may account for this etymology, where the Ur- prefix is used to signify origins. An Ur-grue would be the mother/father of all grues, or possibly the first grue.
, he is forced to find a way to extinguish them all.
Grues
make an appearance in Dungeons & Dragons
. Aside from a reference to their being "born in places of darkness" on the Inner Planes and a general sense of shapeless menace, they have very little in common with their Infocom namesakes, despite having been introduced soon after the first Zork games and presumably having been inspired by them. The same creature also existed in the Gateway Bestiary, written for the second edition of the game, but was not at that time given the name "grue".
The Nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot
composed a song titled "It Is Pitch Dark" which refers to the predicaments one faces without a torch or match in your inventory, as well as referencing several other well-known computer adventure games; its refrain is "You are likely to be eaten by a grue".
They have been often mentioned in the comic strip User Friendly
with the character A.J. Garret having a phobia of them and doing everything he can to avoid them and the dark places they inhabit. He refuses to listen to the comments of his coworkers stating that grues do not exist. This led to the title of the fourth compilation book, Even Grues Get Full, from a story arc involving him getting scared of grues while trying to move into a dark abandoned missile silo.
On IGN
's list of the Top 100 Video Game Villains of All Time, the grue was listed as number 46. When summing up the creature and the development behind it IGN wrote, "The grue's presence may have been a handy solution to a very particular problem in the game design, but it has grown far beyond being a mere gameplay convenience to become one of the chief boogiemen in the early history of video games."
Gaia Online
's MMO, zOMG!, has an area where the Grue can appear, instantly defeating your team.
Jack Vance
John Holbrook Vance is an American mystery, fantasy and science fiction author. Most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance. Vance has published 11 mysteries as John Holbrook Vance and 3 as Ellery Queen...
's Dying Earth
universe (described as being part "ocular bat", part "unusual hoon" and part man).
Dave Lebling
Dave Lebling
P. David Lebling is an interactive fiction game designer and programmer who has worked at various companies, including Infocom and Avid....
introduced a similar monster, whose name was borrowed from Vance's grues, into the interactive fiction computer game Zork
Zork
Zork was one of the first interactive fiction computer games and an early descendant of Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written in 1977–1979 on a DEC PDP-10 computer by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, and implemented in the MDL programming language...
, published by Infocom
Infocom
Infocom was a software company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced one notable business application, a relational database called Cornerstone....
. Zork's grues fear light and are ravenous devourers of adventurers, making it impossible to explore the game's dark areas without a light source. The grue subsequently appeared in other Infocom games.
Due to Zork's prominent position in hacker history and lore, its grues have served as models for monsters in many subsequent games, such as roguelike
Roguelike
The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many...
games and MUD
MUD
A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...
s.
Zork lore
The first mention of grues in the Zork games is the following ominous line:- It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Further investigation will reveal more about their nature:
- > 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.
This warning is not to be taken lightly. 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. Originally, grues were not a threat as long as one remained still and didn't leave one's location, but in later games it has been possible, in certain situations, to be eaten by a grue simply by waiting around in the dark. While the juveniles are almost transparent, adults are dark brown and covered with a gelatinous sheath.
Grues were invented to limit players' options when faced with unlit areas. If a player should attempt to blunder about in the darkness in hopes of achieving whatever goal first brought them there, the presence of grues ensures that they will fail, forcing the player to solve any light-related puzzles first. Zork
Colossal Cave Adventure
Colossal Cave Adventure gave its name to the computer adventure game genre . It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and caving enthusiast who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky...
, 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
Attic
An attic is a space found directly below the pitched roof of a house or other building . Attic is generally the American/Canadian reference to it...
of a house, and with no corroborating evidence elsewhere (such as holes in the ceiling or floor in the room directly below). Thus, Dave Lebling
Dave Lebling
P. David Lebling is an interactive fiction game designer and programmer who has worked at various companies, including Infocom and Avid....
envisioned a wandering, light-fearing monster that could do the job of the bottomless pits, and, taking the name from Vance's work as having the right connotations, introduced grues in the next version of Zork. The version update document made a humorous reference to the "dungeon maintainers" painstakingly filling up the bottomless pits and restocking the dungeon with grues. Years later, the Zork prequel game, Zork Zero
Zork Zero
Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz is an interactive fiction computer game, written by Steve Meretzky over nearly 18 months and published by Infocom in 1988, with an original retail price of $59.95...
, would feature the protagonist doing exactly that: forced to use a magic device to seal up the realm's bottomless pits that are blocking his or her path, he or she unwittingly forces out the myriad colonies of grues that have been nesting there, leaving them to wander the underground caverns searching for food.
Grues have been featured in each of the Zork games (with the possible exception of Enchanter
Enchanter (computer game)
Enchanter is a 1983 interactive fiction computer game written by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling and published by Infocom. It belongs to the fantasy genre and was the first fantasy game published by Infocom after the Zork trilogy...
) and many other of Infocom's games, becoming a company trademark or in-joke
In-joke
An in-joke, also known as an inside joke or in joke, is a joke whose humour is clear only to people who are in a particular social group, occupation, or other community of common understanding...
, often referred to with the stock phrases of "slavering fangs", "razor-sharp claws" and "horrible gurgling noises". The science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
title Starcross
Starcross (computer game)
Starcross is a 1982 interactive fiction game designed and implemented by Dave Lebling and published by Infocom. Like most Infocom titles, it was developed for many systems. It was released for DOS, as a PC Booter, Apple II, Atari ST and Commodore 64. It is Infocom's fifth game.The game was...
reuses both the "You are likely to be eaten by a grue" line and the grue's description, replacing the word "adventurer" with the current job title of the protagonist. 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 subsequently spread around the galaxy alongside man and become a universal pest for human civilizations. The term crops up as an in-joke in other contexts as well, such as a racehorse named "Lurking Grue" in the modern-day murder mystery Suspect
Suspect (computer game)
Suspect is an interactive fiction computer game designed by Dave Lebling and published by Infocom in 1984. It is the last murder mystery Infocom released, bringing an end to a popular genre of titles such as Deadline and The Witness...
.
Much is made of the idea that grues have such an aversion to light that no one has ever seen one and it is impossible to gain a firsthand physical description of one and that, conversely, grues are such formidable predators that light is the only possible means of avoiding them. Neither of these ideas held absolutely true throughout the entire Infocom line of games. For instance, the game Sorcerer, which provided a wide variety of humorous responses to creative uses of magic spells, allowed the player to cast the Frotz spell on a grue, causing a "horrible, multi-fanged creature" from just outside the range of vision to run through the room "gurgling in agony and tearing at its fur". The game similarly provided a potion that granted the ability to see in darkness as a trap for players who forgot that the main purpose of a light source in the Zork games is not to preserve one's own vision but to repel grues; taking the night vision potion and turning off one's light source results in the almost immediate encounter with, and subsequent devouring by, a grue. Near the end of the game, it is revealed that the main villain's plot for conquering the world involves manufacturing an army of light-resistant grues using a conveniently provided Frobozz Magic Company device.
As time went on the games became increasingly bold in their treatment of grues — Wishbringer
Wishbringer
Wishbringer: The Magick Stone of Dreams is an interactive fiction computer game written by Brian Moriarty and published by Infocom in 1985. It was intended to be an easier game to solve than the typical Infocom release, and provide a good introduction to interactive fiction for inexperienced players...
allows the player to stumble upon a baby grue and get a good look at it before its parents return (described as a "horrid little beast with red eyes and slavering fangs"). (Zork: The Undiscovered Underground
Zork: The Undiscovered Underground
Zork: The Undiscovered Underground is an interactive fiction computer game written by former Infocom Implementors Marc Blank and Michael Berlyn and implemented by G. Kevin Wilson using the Inform language. The game was released by Activision on August 28, 1997 for free to coincide with the release...
, a freeware
Freeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
game that was released 12 years later, states that the character in that game is the first person to see a grue.) Spellbreaker
Spellbreaker
Spellbreaker is an interactive fiction computer game written by Dave Lebling and released by Infocom in 1985, the third and final game in the "Enchanter Trilogy". Like most of Infocom's games, it was released for many of the time's popular computer platforms, such as the Commodore 64, Atari ST and...
, which had the player traveling through magical planes that represented various elements
Classical element
Many philosophies and worldviews have a set of classical elements believed to reflect the simplest essential parts and principles of which anything consists or upon which the constitution and fundamental powers of anything are based. Most frequently, classical elements refer to ancient beliefs...
and principle
Principle
A principle is a law or rule that has to be, or usually is to be followed, or can be desirably followed, or is an inevitable consequence of something, such as the laws observed in nature or the way that a system is constructed...
s, had the 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 the ancient king Entharion the Wise and the legendary blade Grueslayer, which he used to directly fight grues in combat; this feat would not be repeated until the interactive fiction/RPG
Role-playing game
A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development...
hybrid Beyond Zork
Beyond Zork
Beyond Zork was an interactive fiction computer game written by Brian Moriarty and released by Infocom in 1987...
, which allows a player who has advanced sufficiently in level and acquired certain items to boldly walk into the dark and kill grues that attack. (This feat required the acquisition of the Pheehelm, a device that boosted the player's intelligence and allowed him/her to sense the grues' movements telepathically without seeing them.) Finally, the modern-day game Zork: The Undiscovered Underground created as a promotion for Zork Grand Inquisitor
Zork Grand Inquisitor
Zork: Grand Inquisitor is a graphical adventure game, developed by Activision and released in 1997 for the IBM compatible PC and Macintosh . It builds upon the Zork and Enchanter series of interactive fiction computer games originally released by Infocom. The cast includes Erick Avari, Dirk...
featured an extended reference to a line in Zork III about "a whole convention of grues" in a certain location, 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 light-hating grues themselves glowing 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, although in an obscure source — one of Steve Meretzky
Steve Meretzky
Steven Eric Meretzky is an American computer game developer, with dozens of titles to his credit. He has been involved in almost every aspect of game development, from design to production to quality assurance and box design...
's Zork gamebooks purposely 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 "anti-grue kit" (admittedly a secret, experimental prototype) that contains a grue costume, with which the player can don and travel among grues unharmed. (The player in Zork: The Undiscovered Underground replicates this feat, albeit imperfectly.)
This is part of the running gag of a series of mostly failed attempts to find some sort of alternate means of protection against grues in the event one's light source fails, most famously in Zork II where a can of Frobozz Magic Grue Repellent was included as a red herring — mostly useless, since it would only last for one game turn after one's light source expired, during which the player couldn't see his location anyway. (In some versions of the game, however, it can be used as an alternate solution to one puzzle.) In Zork III the Magic Grue Repellent functions more like the player might expect, and lasts for several turns.
The actual reason light acts as such a potent Achilles' heel
Achilles' heel
An Achilles’ heel is a deadly weakness in spite of overall strength, that can actually or potentially lead to downfall. While the mythological origin refers to a physical vulnerability, metaphorical references to other attributes or qualities that can lead to downfall are common.- Origin :In Greek...
for grues is inconsistently given — some games imply that grues find levels of light ordinary for humans to be intolerably, blindingly painful but can nonetheless survive it (such as in Planetfall, where an obviously grue-like creature exists in a lit laboratory, "squinting and cursing at the light" — although the laboratory contains other creatures that are clearly mutants, so it is possible that this grue is simply a mutant that is able to survive in a lighted area.) Zork: The Undiscovered Underground goes to the other extreme, having a grue caught in the light spontaneously combust
Spontaneous combustion
Spontaneous combustion is the self-ignition of a mass, for example, a pile of oily rags. Allegedly, humans can also ignite and burn without an obvious cause; this phenomenon is known as spontaneous human combustion....
on the spot. This latter explanation seems closer to the canon established by the main Infocom game series, since in Spellbreaker, if the player is shapeshifted into a grue and remains in a lit area for too long the light eventually kills him/her (and it is implied that the amount of light to which he or she is exposed is so faint as to be invisible to human eyes). However, in the Zork Trilogy, the player carries around an Elven sword that glows whenever he or she is near danger, the glow being described as a faint blue glow (when one room away from a dangerous creature) or a bright blue glow (when in the same room). The sword glows in response to the proximity of any dangerous creature, whether a grue or of some other type, and grues can still kill a player when his sword is glowing, even very brightly; therefore, either a) there is variation between games as to how much light a grue can safely encounter or b) only light having one or more properties that the sword's light does not exhibit (e.g., a wavelength/frequency/color within a specific range not including that of the sword's light) is harmful to grues.
The question of how grues are able to survive undetected at all without being trapped in a dead end by a wandering human with a lantern has often been debated by fans, attributed either to their ability to travel through tunnels humans cannot see nor use or to use something akin to Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy role-playing game originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. . The game has been published by Wizards of the Coast since 1997...
"shadow jump" ability.
The modern graphical adventure games in the Zork series continue references to grues, with gurgling and growling grue sound effects audible in most shadowy or gloomy places and many points at which players can meet a gruesome death by wandering without light. A possible parody of the concept appeared in one puzzle in Return To Zork
Return to Zork
Return to Zork is a 1993 adventure game in the Zork series. It was developed by Activision and was the final Zork game to be published under the Infocom label.-Gameplay:...
, in which the player was in danger of being attacked by a grue after turning the light off in their own bedroom in a hotel; the only solution is to place a piece of lightly glowing, magical rock called Illumynite on the nightstand, providing just enough light to ward off grues while still making it possible to sleep. The in-jokes continue as well, with Zork Nemesis continuing a running gag about failed attempts to capture or domesticate grues by including in a library a book, "Interview with a Grue", that sported an illustration captioned "The Grue In Its Natural Habitat" (a blank black square). Zork Grand Inquisitor added to grue trivia the idea of the game "Grue, Fire, Water", a variant of Rock, Paper, Scissors
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Rock-paper-scissors is a hand game played by two people. The game is also known as roshambo, or another ordering of the three items ....
wherein "Grue drinks water, water douses fire, and fire scares grue."
Ur-grue
In the fourth Zork game, Beyond ZorkBeyond Zork
Beyond Zork was an interactive fiction computer game written by Brian Moriarty and released by Infocom in 1987...
, an evil being called an "Ur-grue" is introduced as the primary villain. Though similar in name, the Ur-grue is significantly different from the classic grue, being more akin to an evil god of darkness than a simple predatory monster.
Again, Scandinavian and German language may account for this etymology, where the Ur- prefix is used to signify origins. An Ur-grue would be the mother/father of all grues, or possibly the first grue.
In popular culture
Grues are a common reference in hacker culture or among computer-savvy people. They have cropped up in other fantasy realms, though rarely, as they are seen as being strongly attached to the Zork universe, Infocom and the medium of interactive fiction in general. For this reason many modern interactive fiction works make extensive in-jokes referencing grues; one of the more extensive parodies is a work called Enlightenment, which takes place in a Zork-like universe where the protagonist has overloaded himself with an abundance of light sources—suddenly finding himself in need of help from grues to defeat a trollTroll
A troll is a supernatural being in Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore. In origin, the term troll was a generally negative synonym for a jötunn , a being in Norse mythology...
, he is forced to find a way to extinguish them all.
Grues
Grue (Dungeons & Dragons)
In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, a grue is a type of elemental.-Publication history:The elemental grues, including the chaggrin, the harginn, the ildriss, and the varrdig, first appear in Monster Manual II . The Monster Manual II was reviewed by Megan C...
make an appearance in Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy role-playing game originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. . The game has been published by Wizards of the Coast since 1997...
. Aside from a reference to their being "born in places of darkness" on the Inner Planes and a general sense of shapeless menace, they have very little in common with their Infocom namesakes, despite having been introduced soon after the first Zork games and presumably having been inspired by them. The same creature also existed in the Gateway Bestiary, written for the second edition of the game, but was not at that time given the name "grue".
The Nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot
MC Frontalot
Damian Hess , better known by stage name MC Frontalot, is a Brooklyn-based hip hop musician and self-proclaimed "world's 579th greatest rapper". He is best known in nerdcore hip hop and video game culture, for naming the nerdcore subgenre, and performing at Penny Arcades annual Penny Arcade Expo...
composed a song titled "It Is Pitch Dark" which refers to the predicaments one faces without a torch or match in your inventory, as well as referencing several other well-known computer adventure games; its refrain is "You are likely to be eaten by a grue".
They have been often mentioned in the comic strip User Friendly
User Friendly
User Friendly is a discontinued daily webcomic about the staff of a small, fictional Internet service provider, Columbia Internet. The strip's humor tends to be centered around technology jokes and geek humour....
with the character A.J. Garret having a phobia of them and doing everything he can to avoid them and the dark places they inhabit. He refuses to listen to the comments of his coworkers stating that grues do not exist. This led to the title of the fourth compilation book, Even Grues Get Full, from a story arc involving him getting scared of grues while trying to move into a dark abandoned missile silo.
On IGN
IGN
IGN is an entertainment website that focuses on video games, films, music and other media. IGN's main website comprises several specialty sites or "channels", each occupying a subdomain and covering a specific area of entertainment...
's list of the Top 100 Video Game Villains of All Time, the grue was listed as number 46. When summing up the creature and the development behind it IGN wrote, "The grue's presence may have been a handy solution to a very particular problem in the game design, but it has grown far beyond being a mere gameplay convenience to become one of the chief boogiemen in the early history of video games."
Gaia Online
Gaia Online
Gaia Online is an English-language, anime-themed social networking and forums-based website. Gaiaonline was founded in 2003. but the name was changed to GaiaOnline.com in 2003 from go-gaia by its owner, Gaia Interactive...
's MMO, zOMG!, has an area where the Grue can appear, instantly defeating your team.