Team Xbox, and Activision are making Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III available under the MIT License.
In collaboration with Jason Scott, the well-known digital archivist of Internet Archive fame, they have officially submitted upstream pull requests to the historical source repositories of Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III. Those pull requests add a clear MIT LICENSE and formally document the open-source grant.
Each repository includes:
- Source code for Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III.
- Accompanying documentation where available, such as build notes, comments, and historically relevant files.
- Clear licensing and attribution, via MIT LICENSE.txt and repository-level metadata.
This release focuses purely on the code itself. It does not include commercial packaging or marketing materials, and it does not grant rights to any trademarks or brands, which remain with their respective owners. All assets outside the scope of these titles' source code are intentionally excluded to preserve historical accuracy.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday November 26, @12:52PM (4 children)
I had never really thought about it until today, I've known about Frotz the zcode interpreter since the 90s but I guess I always thought they created zcode files using a very custom editor like modern interactive fiction authors or maybe the really hard core folks used a hex debugger or more likely definitions and macros in an assembler. Although maybe I had skipped over mentions of ZIL etc over the last 40 years or so.
The most interesting part of the story is, of course, skipped over by the usual journalist and AI interpretations of the story: The architecture of a system like Java goes back a LOT further than the 90s and is hardly unique. Infocom games were like pascal p-code or java in that apparently they were written in ZIL which compiled to zcode and there were minor mods for the numerous home computers of the era but "pretty much" any zcode would be rendered on any computer of the late 70s and 80s. Write once run everywhere. Back around the turn of the century I got frotz running and IIRC you could scavenge any zcode file from any 80s home computer and frotz would properly render it on linux. IIRC its not just running in a little emulator it did/does full text reflow. Remember something like a TRS-80 model III only had 64 columns of text (unfortunately not kidding, that was my first computer). Or the coco had 32 when connected to a TV for display. Anyway IIRC its the same zcode file on all machines plus or minus the most minimal modifications (like the only difference being a copyright message describing it as "planetfall for the C64" vs Apple II or WTF, although I may misremember)
In my infinite spare time I would like to investigate how the hell Seastalker worked. I think this was the infocom hackers greatest production. The game itself was "meh" when I played it in the mid 80s when it was new, but technologically it was stunning. They took a text-mode conversational game engine and turned it, partially, into a text-mode arcade game. I vaguely recall driving my submarine around on the screen. It didn't even look good and the plot was blah but it certainly would impress a kid in the mid 80s to think you're starting a conversational text adventure and next thing you know you're playing text mode pacman or whatever it was. Its not that running doom as an awk would be amazing performance or appearance, it would be amazing that it worked at all. That was Seastalker in the mid 80s. There were better text-mode arcade games of the era like Kingdom of kroz and all that, but just the audacity to try it, it worked, ship it, was technically impressive. "Shouldn't be possible"
There's plenty of nostalgia about text mode adventure games. The best text mode adventure game IMHO is probably Xenos from 1982 because my dad and I solved it together in mere weeks of its release back in the very early 80s and this is long before the internet and even BBSes were not popular yet (existed, but not popular, at least in my area code or LATA anyway). As far as we could tell from the local ham radio / computer club we were the first people in our area to have solved Xenos. It's what decades later would be called "Weird Western" genre its all area 51 ufos in the desert stuff, pretty creative.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Wednesday November 26, @06:34PM (3 children)
I downloaded the files, but saw no text. Only HTML and CSS pointing to other web sites. Thirty wasted minutes.
No one born who could always afford anything he wanted can have a clue what "affordability" means.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday November 26, @09:45PM (1 child)
I think this is the site you want?
https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1 [github.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday December 09, @02:50PM
Indeed it is, thank you!
No one born who could always afford anything he wanted can have a clue what "affordability" means.
(Score: 4, Funny) by pTamok on Wednesday November 26, @10:08PM
Were they a maze of twisty little links, all different?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 26, @01:06PM (1 child)
Come on AI just call them "feelies" we've been using that since at least the turn of the century although I don't remember it contemporary.
I don't think you get the full "Deadline" experience without a gray box containing a little evidence bag with tablets in it, a typewritten coroners report, crime scene photos, fingerprint sheets, lab reports, memos, etc.
Deadline was sort of a computer mediated "solve a mystery". They're surprisingly popular now a days and I'm not into that genre but I would be surprised if there were not mobile phone games to "solve a mystery".
IIRC Zork came with a not terribly helpful map and a VERY short sort-of-dnd-sourcebook about the zork universe. Unnecessary but cool looking. IIRC the zork world is geographically reminiscent of the LotR world map LOL. Like really you put forests and mountains in the same spots? Really?
Anyway if the feelies are still copyrighted you can do the usual "yo ho ho" stuff to none the less find pictures of people's feelie collections.
Feelies were an interesting anti-piracy scheme, I don't think the fake ID in "Lurking Horror" is worth list price but it feels better to buy the box. In the late 90s before steam you'd get HUGE game boxes that were empty except for a single cdrom in a paper sleeve, nothing else. Sure I'd "copy that floppy" but I wouldn't copy a GUE-Tech student ID card sort of a cool little relic.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy feelies were hilarious.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday November 26, @06:18PM
I personally appreciate the honesty of that. Gamer crack is also acceptable though.