You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source
Microsoft developer boss Scott Hanselman saved the company's Ignite shindig this week by unveiling the source code for Zork I-III, all available under the MIT license.
"Our goal is simple: to place historically important code in the hands of students, teachers, and developers so they can study it, learn from it, and, perhaps most importantly, play it," said the announcement from Hanselman and Stacey Haffner, Director of Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office (OSPO).
Zork is a milestone in gaming history. Inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork is a text adventure that allows players to interact with the game using natural language (relative to what went before). Not so much "go north" but more "climb up the tree."
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Initially developed for the PDP-10 computer, the game was split into three parts by Infocom to fit on the personal computers of the time. The company's founders included the game's original developers.
The game was ported to the Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), which ran on a Z-machine, a virtual machine developed by Infocom for its text adventure games. This meant that running Zork (and the vast majority of Infocom games) on different computer architectures just required porting the Z-machine. Infocom's wares were therefore everywhere.
Zork was wildly successful. The parser was a step up from what had come before, and it was easy to become deeply immersed in the world of the game without the need for joysticks, mice, or water-cooled graphics cards.
Activision acquired Infocom in 1986, and Microsoft acquired Activision in 2023.
It is still possible to purchase Zork, and the repositories contain only the source for Zork I, II, and III. The announcement suggests using ZILF (ZIL Forever) to compile and assemble the source into a runnable Z3 file. Then fire up something like Windows Frotz to be transported back to the 1980s and the world of Zork.
Although Zork is perhaps one of the most documented games in history, and subsequent compilers, such as Inform, have kept the, er, lantern ablaze, having the original source files available for inspection is both educational and fun. Hanselman posted: "I wanted to make the ZIL OSS so students and teachers could use them in classes without concern."
Although Hanselman chose to show off the code by spinning up containers in Microsoft's cloud to run it, it will also run perfectly happily on a local computer.
And daring to demo it on stage runs an obvious risk. No, not from the capricious whims of the conference Wi-Fi gods, but the ever-present danger of being eaten by a grue. ®
