When I was 14 or so, in the early 1980s, a friend and I who had been playing Zork thought it would be fun to design a game ourselves. We actually wrote to Infocom with a proposal that we write a new game for them and they let us use ZIL and the Z-machine to implement it. Surprisingly, they actually wrote back to us and politely declined our offer. In hindsight, while we knew how to program in BASIC and assembly language on our Apple IIs, we would have been lost making a game with ZIL. That’s to say that Infocom made the right call. Still, it said something about the company that they treated a couple kids with respect and didn’t laugh in our faces. I wish I still had the letter.
In the 1980s, I was interested in text adventure games, and had a kind of book/magazine on the topic of how to write them. In BASIC, obviously (groan) because that's what was easily accessible back then.
I remember figuring out the mechanisms that the book introduced: what kind of rudimentary data structures to use to represent the state of the world, the locations of objects, etc.
I got some simple stuff to work, you could navigate the world, pick up and drop objects, etc. but then my motivation gradually ran out because I didn't have a clearly defined design for the game I was going to build.
I had a few pirated games (C64, Amiga): "Death in the Caribbean", "The Pawn", etc but never had the motivation to stick with them past the first or second puzzle. The puzzles seemed like if the answer didn't arrive via a flash of divine inspiration, there was no way to figure it out based on logical reasoning. Maybe that part of my brain wasn't developed back then.
My goodness, I could have written this word-for-word. Similar age, same Apple II BASIC and 6502 upbringing (roll sleeves and call -151) and also wrote to Infocom. We were in the UK so even more surprised to get a reply similar to yours several weeks later. Sadly my letter is also lost to various house moves. Or eaten by a grue.
Me too, except my letter was to Sierra On-Line and my experience was on TRS-80 6809. Really classy reply asking me to write back when I finished school.
This literally gave me goosebumps. It's hard to convey how much Zork (and the rest of the Infocom portfolio) means to me. This was my first entry into gaming on my Commodore 64.
For anyone out there who had anything to do with bringing these games to market, know that you impacted so many lives in a fun, meaningful, heartfelt way.
You're one of today's lucky 10,000. It was huge news at the time. The FTC considered not allowing it and the acquisition got delayed for months while back and forth public debate raged.
Easy to forget all the big moves that happened recently, especially since there haven't been (afaict) any major changes to service. I forgot the other day that Sony had bought Bungie, though it'd be pretty memorable if Sony announced Destiny 3 as a PS5 timed exclusive.
Massive media/telecom/tech companies get passed around between other massive media/telecom/tech companies so much that regardless of how much you saw the news at the time, a couple of years later it's tough to remember "Now who is it that owns Warner Bros. currently? AOL? AT&T? Netflix? The sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia?"
And Sierra. It would be amazing if MS released the source code to some of Sierra classic Hi-Res/AGI/SCI games, or the engines themselves.
IIRC, Al Lowe had retained copies of source code from the early Sierra days, and was planning to release some of it publicly a few years ago, but Activision shut him down. Maybe MS would be willing to reconsider that now that they're pursuing historical preservation.
I don't specifically know why that appeals to me. I guess it's because I'd like to tinker with it and understand it better. And if I were going to write Zork I from scratch today, I'd want to use the most modern tools available. [checks notes] Okay, but not Inform 7. I have an aversion to Inform 7. I want my code to look more like code, and less like an LLM prompt.
I've seen a few things called 'Zork source code' in various places over the years (even on a CD that came with a game programming book of some sort), and copies like this:
Zork was originally written at MIT for PDP-10s in an obscure Lisp dialect (MDL). The authors then later formed a company to sell the game on micro-computers. To do it, they built a virtual machine optimized for this purpose, a new Lisp dialect (ZIL) that could compile to the virtual machine, and the ported the game over to that new dialect. Even so, they had to split the game into three parts to fit.
The source you're linking to is the original MDL source. This is about the ZIL source for the three games that the original Zork was split into.
MDL was a dialect of lisp invented by/in part/under Sussman, the originator of Scheme and SICP; what you're calling an obscure dialect was was part of the continuum of a research trajectory, one of a number of experimental languages designed to test out ideas. Sussman got his PhD in 1973 so we're talking about his later work as a student/early work as a postdoc/assistant professor, and Abelson was in the same timeframe, and Guy Steele a half decade junior, and many others in the lab whose names you would also recognize.
You're kind of in luck. For a while, it was trendy (because MIT was doing it) to teach Intro to Programming with Lisps, especially Scheme. Because of this, there are quite a few "learn programming with Lisp" books and resources. The famous "SICP" book was the textbook for the MIT course and all of the examples were Lisp (there's a newer version that uses JavaScript, I think). There are loads of fine online books and guides. Here's a random online book: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/
In no time you'll be putting up "my other car is a cdr" bumper stickers!
> In no time you'll be putting up "my other car is a cdr" bumper stickers!
Yeah but then learning Lisp is going to get in the way of welding up new bumper brackets, and the bumper will still be lying in the pile of things beside the shed waiting to be reattached... ;-)
i'm not a complete expert on this, but the dates entailed here trigger clear memories.
the date on the Zork archive you linked to is 1977. in 1977 there was not really yet a notable software market for personal computers based on microcomputer chips, and software development at MIT in that timeframe would have been on Multics or DEC-10 or 20's and (probably not quite) the dawn of Vax-750s
just a couple years later the names on the archive you linked to went on to found infocom to sell this software ported to personal computers, Apple II 6502's or CPM S-100 bus 8080 and Z80s.
the Colossol Cave Adventure game for the PDP-10 had been released (to other institutions that had PDP-10's) just a couple years before and had caught fire in popularity at universities. These people at MIT took the same idea and reimplemented it with embellishments.
Good question, I'm also curious. A quick search shows that there are some differences. The one in this new historicalsources folder has the PLUGH easter egg, but the other one doesn't seem to have it.
But the older version has a "Tomb of the Unknown Implementor," which this new version seems to lack.
Yes. Because it is pitch black and therefore you can not determine it's color (plus, the fact that you haven't been eaten by one yet does not justify the conclusion that you won't be). It's also a play on Gardener's "unexpected hanging paradox".
If I'm reading this right, the source code has been available for all the Infocom games in https://github.com/historicalsource for at least six years, but what's changed today is the license?
Funnily enough you can easily find the Windows XP source code on GitHub. Not endorsed by Microsoft of course, but they've ignored it sitting on their own service for years, along with ignoring all the modern Windows and Office piracy tools which are also on GitHub. Microsoft works in mysterious ways.
> along with ignoring all the modern Windows and Office piracy tools which are also on GitHub
You weren't going to buy it anyway. No-one cares about you. Pirate it if you like. Take your warezed copy of Office Home Edition and be blessed, no-one is going to miss your 120 bucks.
An organisation with maybe 100,000 users each paying a per-seat licence? Yeah, that's the sale they want. Not your one-off copy.
If AGI ever comes close to fruition I can't wait to just dump this code into some AI, tell it to fix all security bugs and make it work on M Series processors. Would finally achieve a computing environment that would be perfect for me. Until then, I will continue to dream.
If we ever get to the point of having a tool that could do something that complex, we're well past the point of using human-written operating systems or using M-series processors.
Most of the money to be made is by licensing software to organisations that can afford the risk of pirating (practically anything bigger than SMBs: enterprises, governments, armies, etc). The moat of everyone used to your platform worths a lot more. So they just regulate enough so it won’t seem like they don’t give a shit at all.
So how good are the latest coding agents? Like if I asked Gemini 3/Claude/ChatGPT 5.1 to convert it into something that could run from a Python interpreter, how far would they get? (I assume Zork Implementation Language is not well represented in the training corpus)
I would love to see the Apple ][ source code made available for a lot of these classic games. In this case what I really want to see is the Z-Engine or interpreter itself not essentially the data files only.
IANAL but copyright is typically the year of first publication.
I could see this being important here in two ways:
1. If the source code of Zork has not been made available to the public before, then now is the year of publication.
2. If Zork source code has previously been made available to the public, perhaps the version published here has had changes made, in which case now is the year of publication of this version of the source code.
I assume that when Microsoft opens source code they have a team of lawyers that have solid legal arguments for what the copyright year should be in each case.
Therefore, maybe it’s even possible legally that
3. Even if source code was previously made available, and even if no changes were made in any way since then to any of the included source code or other files, perhaps just the act of using a different license is in its own way part of how copyright applies. Publishing something under a specific license in $CURRENT_YEAR does not retroactively make the license apply before the time at which it was made available under that license and so perhaps an argument could be made that copyright year in a license includes taking that into consideration.
This is exactly the kind of thing Microsoft likes to opensource: old, crusty, and obsolete. Let's compare. When ID Software opensourced Doom a few years after it's initial release, there was still some life in it and it spawned a myriad of forks and new developments continuing to this day. An active community formed around it. When Microsoft opensourced MSDOS, an opensource clone had existed for so long it was only of interrest to archeologists and historians. It was as whitered and lifeless as Zork is.
Yeah. I had to walk down memory lane to try to remember who bought whom as well. I completely forgot that Activision/Blizzard is a subsidiary of Microsoft Gaming these days.
I’m curious why they chose MDL rather than Lisp for it. Sure, it would have been ancient MACLISP or whatever, but why not leverage what was already in wide use at MIT at the time?
bummer
> The code relies on old internal Infocom toolchains (ZILCH compiler, WATFOR,
> mainframe environment) that are not open and likely not preserved.
Perhaps this is a stupid/contentious idea (partly because it somewhat kills the "spirit" of the original games), but there's a little part of me that would be interested in seeing the scene building parts of Zork piped into an image generation service to visualize the landscape that the game describes.
(the grue would obviously just a picture full of black, though some creepy eyes would be a nice touch)
It seems likely that the entirety of Zork (world state and the possible actions to transform it) is already learned by the model. Which means that there is a grue in there, too. Not good. I’m starting to re-think the doomer argument...
Great, I remember a page which stated that it was sad to have free as in freedom ZMachine languages and interpreters (Inform6, Frotz/Fizmo...) but there were very few text adventures under a libre license. So far, the most known ones:
There's also Frotz and other Z Machine interpreters, and the actual Zblorb game file. But I guess this would be the source code that compiles to the zblorb.
So this is useful to modify zork, but not much changes if you want to build something around zork, as you will most likely be building something that interfaces at the z machine level.
This is the source code to the original, non-commercial version of Zork that originated at MIT. Microsoft has now released the source code for the Infocom's commercial release for microcomputers.
Dang. I had forgotten Zenimax got scooped up by MSFT Gaming a few years back. It's not an unreasonable request, though I suspect it should be made directly to MSFT Gaming.
By number of acquired studios, Microsoft is one of the biggest publishers, hence even if XBox the console goes bust, they still have a big weight as Microsoft Game Studios and XBox brand.
I wonder how long before someone hooks up AI image generation for the scenes with this. It could either be very tastefully done or complete slop. Probably the second option.
In the early days of LLMs I tried it, but it was kinda terrible, and I also realised that the fun of these games, like reading a book, was the imagining of the action. Take that away and they are very simple puzzle games
There was a game I remember from the 80s that had such a (to me) tasteful background of still images to go with the text adventure; Time and Magik trilogy on Atari ST. [1]
There have been a couple attempts at this kind of thing (same with AI generation of images from pages of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books).
It's more a gimmick than anything particularly useful. Might even distract if the image embellishes from the original description leading players down the wrong path for solving a puzzle.
> It could either be very tastefully done or complete slop.
It really depends on the creator. A slop is a side effect of the fact that the entry barrier has been much lowered. Previously you at least had to put some effort into learning the craft before showing that to the world.
The others don't seem to have the MIT license pullreq added, so they are not open source; the source code is merely available. The repos have a note:
"This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, allowing researchers and students to study how code was made for these interactive fiction games and how the system dealt with input and processing. It is not considered to be under an open license."
This github repo has been up for some years now (this old blog post has some back story: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-sourc... ) -- AFAIK it's the source contents from an old hard drive image from back when Infocom was a company.
(I only checked hitchhikers and starcross, because github is giving a lot of error pages for these right now.)
Yeah the code was leaked without Activision's permission a few years ago. It's strange to me that Microsoft has taken this opportunity to clear up the rights to Zork 1-3 but not to the rest of the Infocom back catalog. The other games haven't been available for sale since the mid 90s when Activision put out a shovelware CD collection containing every Infocom game except Hitchhiker's and Shogun, so it's not like they have much commercial value.
> It's strange to me that Microsoft has taken this opportunity to clear up the rights to Zork 1-3 but not to the rest of the Infocom back catalog.
Likely explanation: their lawyers are worried there may be third party rights or agreements limiting their ability to open source a game – even if that isn't true, lawyers want to see paperwork to convince themselves it isn't true. For Zork, that was comparatively easy because the game's history is well-known, and Activision had a history of releasing sequels. For other games, that may be more difficult – so start with the lowest hanging and highest profile fruit.
When I was 14 or so, in the early 1980s, a friend and I who had been playing Zork thought it would be fun to design a game ourselves. We actually wrote to Infocom with a proposal that we write a new game for them and they let us use ZIL and the Z-machine to implement it. Surprisingly, they actually wrote back to us and politely declined our offer. In hindsight, while we knew how to program in BASIC and assembly language on our Apple IIs, we would have been lost making a game with ZIL. That’s to say that Infocom made the right call. Still, it said something about the company that they treated a couple kids with respect and didn’t laugh in our faces. I wish I still had the letter.
In the 1980s, I was interested in text adventure games, and had a kind of book/magazine on the topic of how to write them. In BASIC, obviously (groan) because that's what was easily accessible back then.
I remember figuring out the mechanisms that the book introduced: what kind of rudimentary data structures to use to represent the state of the world, the locations of objects, etc.
I got some simple stuff to work, you could navigate the world, pick up and drop objects, etc. but then my motivation gradually ran out because I didn't have a clearly defined design for the game I was going to build.
I had a few pirated games (C64, Amiga): "Death in the Caribbean", "The Pawn", etc but never had the motivation to stick with them past the first or second puzzle. The puzzles seemed like if the answer didn't arrive via a flash of divine inspiration, there was no way to figure it out based on logical reasoning. Maybe that part of my brain wasn't developed back then.
My goodness, I could have written this word-for-word. Similar age, same Apple II BASIC and 6502 upbringing (roll sleeves and call -151) and also wrote to Infocom. We were in the UK so even more surprised to get a reply similar to yours several weeks later. Sadly my letter is also lost to various house moves. Or eaten by a grue.
Ha! They probably assigned an intern to reply to all the kids wanting to help them write the “next one.” Too funny! They had class, Infocom did.
Me too, except my letter was to Sierra On-Line and my experience was on TRS-80 6809. Really classy reply asking me to write back when I finished school.
This literally gave me goosebumps. It's hard to convey how much Zork (and the rest of the Infocom portfolio) means to me. This was my first entry into gaming on my Commodore 64.
For anyone out there who had anything to do with bringing these games to market, know that you impacted so many lives in a fun, meaningful, heartfelt way.
https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1 Direct link to the repository
Is it just me or is GitHub having errors again? I keep getting 500s.
I got hit as well. It was dark. I was likely to be eaten by a grue.
The pages loads for me but I see a "Cannot retrieve latest commit at this time." message.
Why does Microsoft own the rights to Zork?
Activision bought Infocom in 1986, and Microsoft purchased Activision in 2023.
Infocom was bought by Activision, ActivisionBlizzard was bought by Microsoft.
whoa til microsoft owns blizzard.
You're one of today's lucky 10,000. It was huge news at the time. The FTC considered not allowing it and the acquisition got delayed for months while back and forth public debate raged.
Easy to forget all the big moves that happened recently, especially since there haven't been (afaict) any major changes to service. I forgot the other day that Sony had bought Bungie, though it'd be pretty memorable if Sony announced Destiny 3 as a PS5 timed exclusive.
Massive media/telecom/tech companies get passed around between other massive media/telecom/tech companies so much that regardless of how much you saw the news at the time, a couple of years later it's tough to remember "Now who is it that owns Warner Bros. currently? AOL? AT&T? Netflix? The sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia?"
And Sierra. It would be amazing if MS released the source code to some of Sierra classic Hi-Res/AGI/SCI games, or the engines themselves.
IIRC, Al Lowe had retained copies of source code from the early Sierra days, and was planning to release some of it publicly a few years ago, but Activision shut him down. Maybe MS would be willing to reconsider that now that they're pursuing historical preservation.
Space Quest IV!!!
Because they bought Activision, who owned the rights since the 80's.
The thing I want is probably very stupid -
I'd like Zork I through III ported to Inform 6...
I don't specifically know why that appeals to me. I guess it's because I'd like to tinker with it and understand it better. And if I were going to write Zork I from scratch today, I'd want to use the most modern tools available. [checks notes] Okay, but not Inform 7. I have an aversion to Inform 7. I want my code to look more like code, and less like an LLM prompt.
I've seen a few things called 'Zork source code' in various places over the years (even on a CD that came with a game programming book of some sort), and copies like this:
https://github.com/MITDDC/zork
What's the lineage here?
Zork was originally written at MIT for PDP-10s in an obscure Lisp dialect (MDL). The authors then later formed a company to sell the game on micro-computers. To do it, they built a virtual machine optimized for this purpose, a new Lisp dialect (ZIL) that could compile to the virtual machine, and the ported the game over to that new dialect. Even so, they had to split the game into three parts to fit.
The source you're linking to is the original MDL source. This is about the ZIL source for the three games that the original Zork was split into.
MDL was a dialect of lisp invented by/in part/under Sussman, the originator of Scheme and SICP; what you're calling an obscure dialect was was part of the continuum of a research trajectory, one of a number of experimental languages designed to test out ideas. Sussman got his PhD in 1973 so we're talking about his later work as a student/early work as a postdoc/assistant professor, and Abelson was in the same timeframe, and Guy Steele a half decade junior, and many others in the lab whose names you would also recognize.
Was go to say - MIT, dec-10: probably not obscure.
This is about the fourth article I've read that mentions Lisp today on here.
Okay, I get it. Lisp is great.
Where should I start? It wasn't like I was planning on doing anything else at work next week...
You're kind of in luck. For a while, it was trendy (because MIT was doing it) to teach Intro to Programming with Lisps, especially Scheme. Because of this, there are quite a few "learn programming with Lisp" books and resources. The famous "SICP" book was the textbook for the MIT course and all of the examples were Lisp (there's a newer version that uses JavaScript, I think). There are loads of fine online books and guides. Here's a random online book: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/
In no time you'll be putting up "my other car is a cdr" bumper stickers!
> In no time you'll be putting up "my other car is a cdr" bumper stickers!
Yeah but then learning Lisp is going to get in the way of welding up new bumper brackets, and the bumper will still be lying in the pile of things beside the shed waiting to be reattached... ;-)
I suggest: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf
With lisp? Honestly I'd start by installing emacs and messing with elisp. It comes with a beginners guide to elisp with the docs iirc
Start with SICP!
i'm not a complete expert on this, but the dates entailed here trigger clear memories.
the date on the Zork archive you linked to is 1977. in 1977 there was not really yet a notable software market for personal computers based on microcomputer chips, and software development at MIT in that timeframe would have been on Multics or DEC-10 or 20's and (probably not quite) the dawn of Vax-750s
just a couple years later the names on the archive you linked to went on to found infocom to sell this software ported to personal computers, Apple II 6502's or CPM S-100 bus 8080 and Z80s.
the Colossol Cave Adventure game for the PDP-10 had been released (to other institutions that had PDP-10's) just a couple years before and had caught fire in popularity at universities. These people at MIT took the same idea and reimplemented it with embellishments.
Good question, I'm also curious. A quick search shows that there are some differences. The one in this new historicalsources folder has the PLUGH easter egg, but the other one doesn't seem to have it.
But the older version has a "Tomb of the Unknown Implementor," which this new version seems to lack.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I wonder if grue was taken from Nelson Goodman's Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction
Nyet. Jack Vance created grues in the one of the Dying Earth series books.
Yes. Because it is pitch black and therefore you can not determine it's color (plus, the fact that you haven't been eaten by one yet does not justify the conclusion that you won't be). It's also a play on Gardener's "unexpected hanging paradox".
Love it. I use a grue reference on 404s to my blog.
https://mordenstar.com/zork
Can ZILF just compile this?
https://zilf.io/
I like playing Zork via docker: https://github.com/clockworksoul/docker-zork1
> docker run -it clockworksoul/zork1
Waiting impatiently for World of Warcraft to be Open Sourced.
Scott: Do the whole library of Infocom games!
If I'm reading this right, the source code has been available for all the Infocom games in https://github.com/historicalsource for at least six years, but what's changed today is the license?
https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/pull/3
This is great, but I'd rather they make Windows 11 open-source instead.
Funnily enough you can easily find the Windows XP source code on GitHub. Not endorsed by Microsoft of course, but they've ignored it sitting on their own service for years, along with ignoring all the modern Windows and Office piracy tools which are also on GitHub. Microsoft works in mysterious ways.
> along with ignoring all the modern Windows and Office piracy tools which are also on GitHub
You weren't going to buy it anyway. No-one cares about you. Pirate it if you like. Take your warezed copy of Office Home Edition and be blessed, no-one is going to miss your 120 bucks.
An organisation with maybe 100,000 users each paying a per-seat licence? Yeah, that's the sale they want. Not your one-off copy.
Yup, they will care when a huge % of people start doing it.
Not really, no.
No-one buys Windows. No-one buys Office. It's a thing that comes bundled with a computer, or that you "acquire" if you need it.
It's only interesting if Barclays are pirating Windows on a massive scale.
Oh shit did I say the name out loud?
Do companies really not buy licenses?
Reputable ones do.
If AGI ever comes close to fruition I can't wait to just dump this code into some AI, tell it to fix all security bugs and make it work on M Series processors. Would finally achieve a computing environment that would be perfect for me. Until then, I will continue to dream.
If we ever get to the point of having a tool that could do something that complex, we're well past the point of using human-written operating systems or using M-series processors.
Which is to say, very, very, very far away.
Why not use AI to make ReactOS better? Is there something in original Windows XP that ReactOS doesn’t want to implement?
Why not just try and compile it yourself, see what happens?
Most of the money to be made is by licensing software to organisations that can afford the risk of pirating (practically anything bigger than SMBs: enterprises, governments, armies, etc). The moat of everyone used to your platform worths a lot more. So they just regulate enough so it won’t seem like they don’t give a shit at all.
So how good are the latest coding agents? Like if I asked Gemini 3/Claude/ChatGPT 5.1 to convert it into something that could run from a Python interpreter, how far would they get? (I assume Zork Implementation Language is not well represented in the training corpus)
I would love to see the Apple ][ source code made available for a lot of these classic games. In this case what I really want to see is the Z-Engine or interpreter itself not essentially the data files only.
The license says it’s copyright 2025. How does that work? Shouldn’t the copyright be something like 1977?
IANAL but copyright is typically the year of first publication.
I could see this being important here in two ways:
1. If the source code of Zork has not been made available to the public before, then now is the year of publication.
2. If Zork source code has previously been made available to the public, perhaps the version published here has had changes made, in which case now is the year of publication of this version of the source code.
I assume that when Microsoft opens source code they have a team of lawyers that have solid legal arguments for what the copyright year should be in each case.
Therefore, maybe it’s even possible legally that
3. Even if source code was previously made available, and even if no changes were made in any way since then to any of the included source code or other files, perhaps just the act of using a different license is in its own way part of how copyright applies. Publishing something under a specific license in $CURRENT_YEAR does not retroactively make the license apply before the time at which it was made available under that license and so perhaps an argument could be made that copyright year in a license includes taking that into consideration.
Wow, didn’t expect this from Microsoft. Amazing to see classic game code being made accessible for learning
This is exactly the kind of thing Microsoft likes to opensource: old, crusty, and obsolete. Let's compare. When ID Software opensourced Doom a few years after it's initial release, there was still some life in it and it spawned a myriad of forks and new developments continuing to this day. An active community formed around it. When Microsoft opensourced MSDOS, an opensource clone had existed for so long it was only of interrest to archeologists and historians. It was as whitered and lifeless as Zork is.
Funny, I exactly expected a lame PR stunt from Microsoft to distract from the endless string of terrible decisions.
… right, Activisiom bought Infocom in the 1980 s…
Yeah. I had to walk down memory lane to try to remember who bought whom as well. I completely forgot that Activision/Blizzard is a subsidiary of Microsoft Gaming these days.
So Zork was written in Lisp? It had to be!
---
<ROUTINE V-ADVENT ()
MDL, actually, which was derived from LISP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language)
I’m curious why they chose MDL rather than Lisp for it. Sure, it would have been ancient MACLISP or whatever, but why not leverage what was already in wide use at MIT at the time?
maybe they just made a mini-lisp and called it MDL?
From one perspective ADVENT is just SHRDLU turned inside out, after all. (Though of course from another perspective it's a fancier WUMPUS.)
('ADVENT' is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure , for anyone who isn't familar.)
I read a while back it’s a language called zil based on MDL.
https://the-rosebush.com/2025/07/studies-of-zil-part-2-how-d...
Pretty huge milestone, congrats. I can imagine how much time / effort it took to get there!
bummer > The code relies on old internal Infocom toolchains (ZILCH compiler, WATFOR, > mainframe environment) that are not open and likely not preserved.
There's this: https://www.ifwiki.org/ZILF https://zilf.io/
Although I haven't played with it and can't tell you whether it can compile the open source Zork.
how could they not title this article GIT FORK ZORK
So derivative works are possible, who will be the first to attach Zork to the OpenAI API?
Perhaps this is a stupid/contentious idea (partly because it somewhat kills the "spirit" of the original games), but there's a little part of me that would be interested in seeing the scene building parts of Zork piped into an image generation service to visualize the landscape that the game describes.
(the grue would obviously just a picture full of black, though some creepy eyes would be a nice touch)
I love the idea that these can live forever in apt/rpm repositories.
It seems likely that the entirety of Zork (world state and the possible actions to transform it) is already learned by the model. Which means that there is a grue in there, too. Not good. I’m starting to re-think the doomer argument...
Make AoE open source please. I am sure Microsoft Empire won't crumble.
“ When Zork arrived, it didn’t just ask players to win; it asked them to imagine”
Sigh… it’s all ChatGPT nowadays ain’t it.
Great, I remember a page which stated that it was sad to have free as in freedom ZMachine languages and interpreters (Inform6, Frotz/Fizmo...) but there were very few text adventures under a libre license. So far, the most known ones:
- Spiritwrak
- All Things Devour
- Calypso
- Tristam Island
Perhaps few classic games were released under FOSS licenses, but there are tons of more recent ones on IFDB.
There's also Frotz and other Z Machine interpreters, and the actual Zblorb game file. But I guess this would be the source code that compiles to the zblorb.
So this is useful to modify zork, but not much changes if you want to build something around zork, as you will most likely be building something that interfaces at the z machine level.
Hasn't the code to Zork been available for ages? For instance: https://github.com/MITDDC/zork
The article states that Microsoft has made a pull request to the existing repos to include the MIT license.
It was public already, what they are doing here is open sourcing the code.
This is the source code to the original, non-commercial version of Zork that originated at MIT. Microsoft has now released the source code for the Infocom's commercial release for microcomputers.
Yes, but that happens to be the mainframe version. They are a bit different.
Can we get a GPL (or even MIT) release of id Tech 7? Pretty please.
Dang. I had forgotten Zenimax got scooped up by MSFT Gaming a few years back. It's not an unreasonable request, though I suspect it should be made directly to MSFT Gaming.
By number of acquired studios, Microsoft is one of the biggest publishers, hence even if XBox the console goes bust, they still have a big weight as Microsoft Game Studios and XBox brand.
And they're been doing it for a while. They bought Ensemble DECADES ago.
xyzzy
Different game.
plugh
I wonder how long before someone hooks up AI image generation for the scenes with this. It could either be very tastefully done or complete slop. Probably the second option.
In the early days of LLMs I tried it, but it was kinda terrible, and I also realised that the fun of these games, like reading a book, was the imagining of the action. Take that away and they are very simple puzzle games
There was a game I remember from the 80s that had such a (to me) tasteful background of still images to go with the text adventure; Time and Magik trilogy on Atari ST. [1]
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/28812/time-and-magik-the-tril...
There have been a couple attempts at this kind of thing (same with AI generation of images from pages of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books).
It's more a gimmick than anything particularly useful. Might even distract if the image embellishes from the original description leading players down the wrong path for solving a puzzle.
> It could either be very tastefully done or complete slop.
It really depends on the creator. A slop is a side effect of the fact that the entry barrier has been much lowered. Previously you at least had to put some effort into learning the craft before showing that to the world.
(URL changed from https://www.theverge.com/news/824881/zork-open-source-micros..., which points to this)
Getting a lot of GitHub errors trying to look at the source code.
Still, pretty cool; I remember playing work as a kid.
It's not just Zork: a number of games, including Hitchhiker's, are open source now. https://github.com/historicalsource
The others don't seem to have the MIT license pullreq added, so they are not open source; the source code is merely available. The repos have a note:
"This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, allowing researchers and students to study how code was made for these interactive fiction games and how the system dealt with input and processing. It is not considered to be under an open license."
This github repo has been up for some years now (this old blog post has some back story: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-sourc... ) -- AFAIK it's the source contents from an old hard drive image from back when Infocom was a company.
(I only checked hitchhikers and starcross, because github is giving a lot of error pages for these right now.)
Yeah the code was leaked without Activision's permission a few years ago. It's strange to me that Microsoft has taken this opportunity to clear up the rights to Zork 1-3 but not to the rest of the Infocom back catalog. The other games haven't been available for sale since the mid 90s when Activision put out a shovelware CD collection containing every Infocom game except Hitchhiker's and Shogun, so it's not like they have much commercial value.
> It's strange to me that Microsoft has taken this opportunity to clear up the rights to Zork 1-3 but not to the rest of the Infocom back catalog.
Likely explanation: their lawyers are worried there may be third party rights or agreements limiting their ability to open source a game – even if that isn't true, lawyers want to see paperwork to convince themselves it isn't true. For Zork, that was comparatively easy because the game's history is well-known, and Activision had a history of releasing sequels. For other games, that may be more difficult – so start with the lowest hanging and highest profile fruit.
I really enjoyed that Activision "shovelware" cd. For a time it made up a large part of my (Linux) game collection. It is not leaving my collection.
I'd be careful about that one, there is still no license for it. Zork is notable here since it just got the MIT License applied to it.
I'd wonder if Hitchhiker's would have some issues with Douglas Adams' estate, given his involvement.
yes, but only Zork 1-3 have official licenses