A hollow voice says "Plugh".
If you're a fan of the famous computer game, "Adventure," in which you
can spend hours exploring a cave full of treasure and peril while haunted
by sepulchral voices, the above will
sound familiar and perhaps take you back a few years.
If not, you can find out more at the links below.
Plugh is a magic word used in several text adventure games, including:
- Adventure (the original)
- Radio Shack's Haunted House (for the TRS-80)
- Pyramid 2000 (another TRS-80 game that was basically a clone of Adventure but took place amongst the pyramids of Egypt)
- Raaka-Tu (yet another TRS-80 adventure game)
- Bedlam (and even yet another TRS-80 adventure game - also available on the TRS-80 Color Computer)
Somehow, however, plugh never quite retained the fame it deserved.
Instead, it fell into the shadows of another more famous magic word:
xyzzy.
Oh, and I never really did know how to pronounce the word, plugh,
Someone recently posted an old usenet article written by Don Woods as follows:
From: Don Woods
Date: 1997/02/27
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: XYZZY
Alas, Crowther was responsible for XYZZY and PLUGH. I
think I remember him saying that he'd generated them at
random, but I don't remember how (or even if) he pronounced
them.
For my part, I say "zizzy" and "ploog". I'm actually rather
emphatic about the latter, since it's supposed to be said in a
hollow voice. I've heard some people pronounce it "plug", "pluh",
or even "pluff", and when I imagine the hollow voice trying to say
those I keep thinking the poor voice is going to break down
laughing... (A hollow laugh, naturally. :-)
On the other hand, PLOVER was my addition, and since it's
keyed to the name of the bird ("an emerald the size of a
plover's egg!") it ought to be pronounced like the bird. But --
aha! -- being ignorant on the topic, I always thought the bird's
name was pronounced ploh-ver. It wasn't until I saw the
discussion here that I thought to look up the word, and found
that both pluh-ver and ploh-ver are accepted, but pluh-ver is
apparently preferred. Oh well. But if you pronounce it pluh-ver,
don't blame me if the magic doesn't work!
-- Don.
Many years ago, my cousin and I were so into these games (especially
Adventure) that we wrote a game language and several adventures that
used this language. You can play these games on your Android phone (search Google Play for "Explore") or on the Web at:
Related links: