Nostalgia for the ’80s continues to reign. (Robot Chicken fans: Have you seen the Pac-Matrix?)

A company called Jolt Online Gaming has acquired the rights to produce a browser-based MMORPG called Legends of Zork. For those of you who have never had the experience of realizing it is dark and you may be eaten by a grue, this is probably not particularly meaningful to you, but for fans of the era of classic Infocom text-adventure games, it is both fascinating and bizarre to see that they’re going to try to turn the Great Underground Empire into a hack-and-slash online multiplayer RPG.

The market for browser-based massively-multiplayer games supports a cottage industry of small companies with a handful of developers, backed by an artist or two, who crank out a reasonably nice living for themselves without ever competing with the big-time. I wonder if we’ll eventually see a roll-up of these guys, or if they like being “lifestyle companies”.