69,105

The number 69,105 was first used in the mainframe game of Zork:

>count leaves
There are 69,105 leaves here.

This is amusing on several levels:

• It is absurd that the adventurer would be able to count so many leaves with such precision, especially in the minute or so time that a normal turn supposedly takes.
• 69 is sexual slang for mutual oral sex.
• Decimal 69 is equal to octal 105, and hexadecimal 69 is equal to decimal 105.

69,105 Usage

• 69,105 Keys (David Welbourn; 2009; Z-code). The title says it all, really.
• Deadsville (William McDuff; 2005; Z-code). 69,105 blades of grass in the graveyard.
• I-0 (Adam Cadre; 1997; Z-code). 69,105 pieces of laundry in the car trunk.
• Kingdom of Loathing is an on-line door game. As a whole, it isn't IF, but its strange leaflet quest is, and reuses the "count leaves" joke.
• Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Steve Meretzky; publisher: Infocom; 1986; Z-code). 69,105 leaves.
• Pass the Banana (Admiral Jota; 1999; Z-code). The story file size is 69,105 bytes.
• Spodgeville Murphy and The Jewelled Eye of Wossname (David Fillmore; 1999; Z-code 5). Count the rocks to learn there are more than 69,105 rocks here.
• Delusions (C. E. Forman; 1996; Z-code 5). The school of fish is released on event #69105.
• Trinity (Brian Moriarty; publisher: Infocom; 1986; Z-code). The Book of Hours has "thousands of vellum leaves". Count leaves: "There are 69,105 leaves here."
• The Witness (Stu Galley; publisher: Infocom; 1983; Z-code). The gun receipt is 69105.
• Zork (Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, Dave Lebling; 1979). First use of 69,105 leaves.

Extract from "Twisty Little Passages"

Zork has a purely numerical joke that may be the most elaborate in all interactive fiction-perhaps even in all computing. In the Clearing a command to count leaves brings the wry response "There are 69,105 leaves here." This reply presupposes a superhuman (and in fact computer-like) adventurer, able to count a tremendous number of objects in the thin slice of time represented by a move. Perhaps this prodigious ability to count is in keeping with the adventurer's autistic nature, as manifested in the emotional understatement and the fixation on objects that Aarseth (1997, 115-117) has pointed out. Whatever the case, the absurd, impossibly accurate count is funny, as is the "364.4 Smoots and one ear" measurement first marked on the Harvard Bridge in October 1958 by MIT students who had just finished measuring the bridge with Oliver Reed Smoot's supine body. The same sexual innuendo is insisted upon twice in the digits "69,105"-the "69" to the left of the comma is repeated to the right of the comma, since decimal 69 is octal 105, and (as is not true in general) hexadecimal 69 is also decimal 105. This number appears again in Infocom works The Witness by Stu Galley (the gun receipt is number 69105) and in Leather Goddesses of Phobos by Steven Meretzky (which has another pile of leaves). In works from the late 1990s, Adam Cadre's I-0 features 69,105 pieces of laundry in the trunk of car; Admiral Jota's in-joke Pass the Banana has a file size of 69,105 bytes. The number also is mentioned in Infocom's newsletter The New Zork Times and in the instructions to Douglas Adams's Bureaucracy, another Infocom work. But in case one's appetite for numeric allusion to mutual oral sex is not satisfied at the "Clearing," there is more in Zork along similar lines. The description of the "Studio" mentions that the "walls and floors are splattered with paints of 69 different colors."

See also

• Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. MIT Press, 2003. Pages 103–104.

External links

• Arc Number at TV Tropes Wiki.
• 69105 at Zork Wiki.