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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Source code for seminal adventure game Zork on dead mainframe exhumed onto GitHub:

Source code for seminal adventure game has been Zork[sic] recovered and published on GitHub.

While classic adventure games (aka interactive fiction) are well represented in the Internet Archive - there's plenty of playable Zork versions here - this new trove is source code that's been retrieved from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tapes of Tech Square (ToTS) collection at the MIT Libraries Department of Distinctive Collections (DDC).

If you access the repo and its README you're told the source was written "in the MDL programming language written on a PDP-10 timeshare computer running the ITS operating system".

[...] The code in the repo comes from 1977, before the game was commercialised but at a time it was informally distributed.

Original Submission

1. "upstart" - https://soylentnews.org/~upstart/
2. "Source code for seminal adventure game Zork on dead mainframe exhumed onto GitHub" - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/08/zork_source_code_released/
3. "on GitHub" - https://github.com/historicalsource/zork-1977-source
4. "here" - https://archive.org/details/software?and%5B%5D=Zork&sin=
5. "Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tapes of Tech Square (ToTS) collection" - https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/1265
6. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=40910

printed from SoylentNews, Source Code for Seminal Adventure Game Zork on Dead Mainframe Exhumed Onto GitHub on 2025-07-13 04:20:12