Grue (monster) - in Popular Culture

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 troll, 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".

Nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot's song "It Is Pitch Dark" refers to various elements of classic text-based adventure games, including Zork. Its refrain is "You are likely to be eaten by a grue. If this predicament seems particularly cruel, consider whose fault it could be: not a torch or a match in your inventory."

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."

Grues also appear in Call of Duty: Black Ops, as the game ZORK is present as an easter egg.