[HN Gopher] Microsoft makes Zork open-source
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft makes Zork open-source
Author : tabletcorry
Score : 339 points
Date : 2025-11-20 18:13 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (opensource.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (opensource.microsoft.com)
| dang wrote:
| (URL changed from https://www.theverge.com/news/824881/zork-open-
| source-micros..., which points to this)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| ... right, Activisiom bought Infocom in the 1980 s...
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| 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.
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Can we get a GPL (or even MIT) release of id Tech 7? Pretty
| please.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| And they're been doing it for a while. They bought Ensemble
| DECADES ago.
| davidw wrote:
| Getting a lot of GitHub errors trying to look at the source code.
|
| Still, pretty cool; I remember playing work as a kid.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Pretty huge milestone, congrats. I can imagine how much time /
| effort it took to get there!
| mike1o1 wrote:
| https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1 Direct link to the
| repository
| tapoxi wrote:
| Is it just me or is GitHub having errors again? I keep getting
| 500s.
| gemakelijk wrote:
| The pages loads for me but I see a "Cannot retrieve latest
| commit at this time." message.
| tclancy wrote:
| I got hit as well. It was dark. I was likely to be eaten by a
| grue.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Why does Microsoft own the rights to Zork?
| seritools wrote:
| Infocom was bought by Activision, ActivisionBlizzard was bought
| by Microsoft.
| randall wrote:
| whoa til microsoft owns blizzard.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| 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.
| danso wrote:
| 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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?"
| Gormo wrote:
| 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.
| lencastre wrote:
| Space Quest IV!!!
| csixty4 wrote:
| Activision bought Infocom in 1986, and Microsoft purchased
| Activision in 2023.
| charonn0 wrote:
| Because they bought Activision, who owned the rights since the
| 80's.
| katspaugh wrote:
| So Zork was written in Lisp? It had to be!
|
| ---
|
| <ROUTINE V-ADVENT () <TELL "A hollow voice says
| \"Fool.\"" CR>>
| agiacalone wrote:
| MDL, actually, which was derived from LISP.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language)
| drob518 wrote:
| 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?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| maybe they just made a mini-lisp and called it MDL?
| drob518 wrote:
| It's very Lispy, but it's not strictly Lisp. Why, for
| instance, use "<" and ">" to surround various forms but
| not others? If they were to make a mini-Lisp, I'd expect
| something more like Gnu Emacs Lisp, something that's
| obviously a Lisp, but heavily influenced by the Lisps of
| the day. I've found a few old MDL manuals linked from
| Wikipedia, but none of them have any sort of "Here's why
| we created MDL" section that I could find.
| staplung wrote:
| MDL is _also_ from MIT and supposedly stood for More
| Datatypes than Lisp. According to wikipedia "MDL provides
| several enhancements to classic Lisp. It supports several
| built-in data types, including lists, strings and arrays,
| and user-defined data types. It offers multithreaded
| expression evaluation and coroutines."
|
| Seems that most of it's novelties were eventually added
| into LISP proper.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| MDL _is_ what was in wide use at MIT at the time, the
| PDP-10 era. The M in MDL is sometimes "MIT" in the various
| backronyms of what it stood for. (Mostly it was apparently
| just short for "muddle", a self-deprecating description.)
|
| (Also, to be technically correct, these source files aren't
| even MDL, they are a further descendant called ZIL [Zork
| Implementation Language].)
| arnonejoe wrote:
| 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...
| leoc wrote:
| 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.)
| WillAdams wrote:
| A nice overview of the source code for that is:
|
| http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
| ginko wrote:
| Hasn't the code to Zork been available for ages? For instance:
| https://github.com/MITDDC/zork
| alt227 wrote:
| 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.
| agiacalone wrote:
| Yes, but that happens to be the mainframe version. They are a
| bit different.
| Gormo wrote:
| 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.
| calibas wrote:
| It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
| esafak wrote:
| I wonder if _grue_ was taken from Nelson Goodman 's _Fact,
| Fiction, and Forecast_.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction
| MarkusQ wrote:
| 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".
| redundantly wrote:
| Nyet. Jack Vance created grues in the one of the Dying Earth
| series books.
| vunderba wrote:
| Love it. I use a grue reference on 404s to my blog.
|
| https://mordenstar.com/zork
| DonHopkins wrote:
| If this predicament seems particularly cruel, consider whose
| fault it could be: not a torch or a match in your inventory.
|
| MC Frontalot - It Is Pitch Dark
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE
|
| Featuring Steve Meretzky!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Meretzky
| bluedino wrote:
| 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?
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| 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.
| jsnell wrote:
| 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| Was go to say - MIT, dec-10: probably not obscure.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| 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...
| mghackerlady wrote:
| 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
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| 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!
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > 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... ;-)
| jsdalton wrote:
| Start with SICP!
| jasaldivara wrote:
| I suggest: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf
| SteveJS wrote:
| The summer before i took 6.001 i read "The little LISPer".
| It is a good intro.
|
| This is the version i read:
|
| https://www.abebooks.com/9780023397639/Little-LISPer-
| Third-E...
| WorldMaker wrote:
| In Grad School I started with an "AI in Lisp Textbook"
| (which was still the most common at the time in the late
| oughts, I hear many have moved to Python since) and
| searched for a Common Lisp interpreter that felt right. I
| think I ended up with SBCL [0], but this was obviously a
| while back so my memory is slippery about it.
|
| (The professor I had for that AI course in Grad School
| didn't know Lisp and wanted to learn it better, especially
| because so much of the textbook was in it, so asked us for
| volunteers to learn it as well and I took that as an
| excuse/challenge to do every project with a language choice
| that semester in Common Lisp.)
|
| [0] https://www.sbcl.org/
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Zork was originally a public-domain mainframe game called
| Dungeon developed at MIT. Its authors founded Infocom, split
| the game into 3 pieces, added more content, and released it for
| microcomputers as the 3 Zork games. The source code that's been
| floating around since the 80s is for the original Dungeon game.
| Between the early 80s and the early 90s, the source was
| translated from MDL to DEC FORTRAN to Unix f77 to C, so you can
| find a variety of copies of the source at different steps of
| that translation process. This is also why the C version
| doesn't look like idiomatic C code.
|
| When Infocom shut down, one or more of the employees took home
| backups of the Infocom file server. Various partial releases
| have been leaked publicly from those backups, including
| tooling/language documentation and the ZIL source code for
| every Infocom game. The ZIL source code has been public since
| 2019. The notable thing that Microsoft is doing here is
| clearing up the rights to the 3 Zork games (but none of the
| rest of the Infocom titles).
| anthk wrote:
| Not PD, but free as a free ber and non-commercial.
| fortran77 wrote:
| xyzzy
| bluGill wrote:
| Different game.
| fortran77 wrote:
| plugh
| ayaros wrote:
| This is great, but I'd rather they make Windows 11 open-source
| instead.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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.
| iddan wrote:
| 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.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| 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.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| 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.
| pavlov wrote:
| Why not use AI to make ReactOS better? Is there something
| in original Windows XP that ReactOS doesn't want to
| implement?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Why not just try and compile it yourself, see what happens?
| chihuahua wrote:
| One does not simply replicate a Windows build lab at
| home. (insert Boromir meme)
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Not with that attitude, old son.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > 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.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yup, they will care when a huge % of people start doing it.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| 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?
| johnisgood wrote:
| Do companies really not buy licenses?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Reputable ones do.
| npteljes wrote:
| They are not this cynical over it, it's part of a plan.
| What they figure is that they can keep MS the de-facto
| standard this way. Photoshop worked the same way for very
| long.
| chihuahua wrote:
| I think it would be safe for Microsoft to release
| (intentionally or unintentionally) the source for just about
| any product. I bet it's incredibly difficult to run a
| successful build. From talking to someone who used to work on
| Excel, it took them around 1 day to build Excel from source.
| And that's if everything goes perfectly and you know exactly
| what you're doing and are using the build system and setup
| and configuration that the Excel team has in place.
| ndiddy wrote:
| People have built working operating systems from both the
| XP/Server 2003 and NT 4 leaks. Here's someone building
| Server 2003 on Windows 11:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWZe00v2Rs0
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Scott: Do the whole library of Infocom games!
| classichasclass wrote:
| It's not just Zork: a number of games, including Hitchhiker's,
| are open source now. https://github.com/historicalsource
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| yes, but only Zork 1-3 have official licenses
| pm215 wrote:
| 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.)
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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.
| skissane wrote:
| > 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.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yeah, they probably started with what was
| easiest/oldest/most iconic with the clearest copyright
| history/ownership record.
|
| In at least one of the above mentioned cases, we do know
| that the current rights holder and/or most recent
| licensee appears to be the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/pro
| grammes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN...
|
| The BBC probably has a say in if that game will be open
| source. (Their multi-decade effort at making the game
| free to play and being open about some of their
| enhancements to it suggests they may be willing to help
| with that, and Microsoft making the first move with Zork
| 1/2/3 may help with any interest there.)
| ndiddy wrote:
| The rights to Hitchhiker's and Shogun reverted to their
| credited authors (Douglas Adams and James Clavell) after
| they went out of print. The rest of the Infocom library
| was created as works for hire entirely by salaried
| Infocom employees, so the rights went from Infocom to
| Activision to Microsoft.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Right, which is why I assume the BBC has the entire
| rights today to Hitchhiker's and was gifted them by
| Douglas Adams' estate, but my searches didn't turn up
| enough evidence to back that assumption so I didn't
| include it, but I'm rather sure of it.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| I bought a version for the mac (OSX), which I managed to
| get moved from 800k floppy to my network drive. The games
| are still on my NAS today and play just fine. Still fun
| to play, someday I hope to find time to solve them. I
| keep the originals so should even be legal.
| Cieric wrote:
| 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.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I'd wonder if Hitchhiker's would have some issues with Douglas
| Adams' estate, given his involvement.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I believe his estate ceded the Infocom game to the BBC who
| have been keeping the game up (free to play) for more than a
| decade now: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0s
| XpnNCv84GpN...
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The notable change is that most of those repos have been
| available not as a open source but "source available" as Fair
| Use (for Archival Purposes), but the copyright owner (Microsoft
| today) has now directly applied the MIT License to three of
| those repos (Zork 1/2/3). Hopefully they will apply it to more
| of them as Microsoft legal allows, but it's still exciting
| they've made three repos officially open source under a FLOSS
| recognized license.
| Aman_Kalwar wrote:
| Wow, didn't expect this from Microsoft. Amazing to see classic
| game code being made accessible for learning
| ghssds wrote:
| 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.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Funny, I exactly expected a lame PR stunt from Microsoft to
| distract from the endless string of terrible decisions.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| learn what? how to print text to stdout? how to do if else
| statements or math.random? I'm sure you can rewrite this in a
| week or in a month from scratch. Next, Microsoft will
| opensource notepad because there are 0 text editors out there.
| It is 1960 after all.
| abtinf wrote:
| The license says it's copyright 2025. How does that work?
| Shouldn't the copyright be something like 1977?
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > IANAL but copyright is typically the year of first
| publication.
|
| Under current copyright law, copyright is effective from the
| moment the work is first set in fixed form, though I think
| copyright used to be based on first publication.
|
| Updates creates a new work, for which the copyright date is
| that of the updated work being completed (which doesn't
| change that some parts are also part of works copyrighted
| earlier and which may enter the public domain earlier.)
| bluGill wrote:
| The copyright on the whole collection is 2025 - which is likely
| just the README or some such thing. Some of the parts are
| copyright 1977. For works created after 1978 copyright would
| last from year of first publication + 90 years, but since most
| of this is written in/before 1977 different laws apply. (I
| suspect that Activation was careful to ensure they keep their
| registration up to date, but there is a slight possibility this
| is all public domain anyway if you want to hire a lawyer to
| check)
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| So derivative works are possible, who will be the first to attach
| Zork to the OpenAI API?
| simonmales wrote:
| I love the idea that these can live forever in apt/rpm
| repositories.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| 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...
| gaudystead wrote:
| 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)
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| 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.
| lkramer wrote:
| 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
| SoKamil wrote:
| > 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| 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...
| vunderba wrote:
| 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.
| dvrp wrote:
| " 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.
| sigmonsays wrote:
| bummer > The code relies on old internal Infocom toolchains
| (ZILCH compiler, WATFOR, > mainframe environment) that are not
| open and likely not preserved.
| bernds74 wrote:
| 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.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The blog post itself suggests using ZILF.
|
| I hope some of those other Infocom tools eventually get open
| sourced for historic curiosity, but ZILF is probably going to
| remain the modern answer for how to compile these files.
| drob518 wrote:
| 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.
| reticulated wrote:
| 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.
| drob518 wrote:
| 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.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 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.
| drob518 wrote:
| Nice.
| brandall10 wrote:
| Lovely to hear this about Infocom and SOL. The former was
| my obsession throughout the mid-late 80s on my Atari 800XL,
| and then the latter for the next few years after getting a
| 386SX in '89.
| eej71 wrote:
| I recall sending a letter to them asking them for
| information on how they compressed their images for their
| hi-res adventure games. While they replied, they said it
| was a trade secret. I was kind of bummed. But being a 12
| year old kid who barely understood the 6502, it probably
| would have gone over my head.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I wrote them, and after a while I received a letter in my
| mailbox, with this stamp: ---v----v----v
| ----v----v--- | _______ | >
| One / \ G < | Lousy / \ U |
| > Point | ___ | E < | | (___) |
| | > <--)___(--> P < | / /
| \ \ o | > / / \ \ s < |
| |-|---------|-| t | > | | \ _ / | | a <
| | | | --(_)-- | | g | > | | /| |\ | | e
| < | |-|---|_|---|-| | > \
| \__/_\__/ / < | _/_______\_ |
| > | f.m.l.c. | < | -------------
| | > < | Donald
| Woods, Editor | > Spelunker Today <
| | |
| ---^----^----^----^----^---
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114927
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8Z1cKUxD9c
|
| https://crpgadventures.blogspot.com/2016/05/zork-victory-
| sor...
| chihuahua wrote:
| 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.
| drob518 wrote:
| Nice. Yep, we wrote our own adventure games in BASIC as well.
| There were a couple problems with that, however. First we
| weren't able to come up with a sophisticated parser like
| Infocom had. We ended up with basic "verb object" parsers,
| ala Scott Adams adventures. Second, we didn't have many rooms
| as it was difficult to fit it all into memory and we didn't
| have the sophisticated incremental loading that Infocom did
| with the Z-machine. Still, it worked.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Writing a terrible "verb object" parser in BASIC was
| certainly a rite of passage for many of us. I recall making
| more than one. I also recall my best one having rudimentary
| "verb object preposition subject" support, but that being
| about my limit at the time in BASIC.
|
| But also I had access to TADS and early Inform (at home)
| and still wound up building a couple in BASIC (because
| school computer labs would have that available).
| jmward01 wrote:
| 'as a kid I....' Man. This brings back memories. I got into the
| BBS world and started programming in earnest because I wanted
| to write shells for the MUDs out at the time. A friend and I
| built some amazing things all in the name of auto-mapping,
| adding graphics, etc etc. Simple games really help confine a
| problem to the point that you can grow your curiosity easily
| with them.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| how could they not title this article GIT FORK ZORK
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| 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
| Gormo wrote:
| Perhaps few classic games were released under FOSS licenses,
| but there are tons of more recent ones on IFDB.
| anthk wrote:
| I know, I play IF games since 2001 and 2002; and my previous
| gameplays where with the classical ones for ZX Spectrum (in
| Spanish) and some freeware games bundled with 'shareware'
| CD's with Winfrotz and later Frotz/NFrotz. Some GNU user used
| to have several under libre licenses (even non-ZMachine
| ones), such as Beyond the Titanic, but he has no working
| repos any more.
| danso wrote:
| 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)
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The easiest way to get it to run from a Python interpreter
| would be to compile the ZIL source to a Z-Machine binary, which
| you can do with ZILF [1], then use a Z Machine library in
| Python (such as a pure Python implementation of the Z-Machine
| [2]) to load/run it.
|
| A coding agent may even be able to suggest that path, as
| knowledge of at least the existence of both ZILF and Python ZVM
| should be in training sets.
|
| The more interesting questions would be how much a coding agent
| could help you write new Zork rooms or similar things _in_ ZIL
| now that these ZIL source files are MIT licensed. I would also
| assume ZIL is not well represented, it 's fork of the Lisp
| family tree (Lisp -> MDL -> ZIL) in generally probably not well
| represented in open source code bases up to this point. (Some
| of that may depend on if the agent was trained on some of these
| historicalsource repos ahead of this open source license
| change, too.)
|
| [1] https://zilf.io/
|
| [2] https://github.com/sussman/zvm
| anthk wrote:
| Also if you don't wall to install a whole C# stack on
| constrained netbook/non supoprted old machine:
|
| https://notabug.org/coderain/zilutils
| MPSimmons wrote:
| I like playing Zork via docker:
| https://github.com/clockworksoul/docker-zork1
|
| > docker run -it clockworksoul/zork1
| clockworksoul wrote:
| Somebody uses it! Yay!
|
| You made my day
| PilotJeff wrote:
| 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.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I have seen some of the interpreter source codes, but I don't
| know if they have been "officially" published. These also
| include some other things such as test files, and a picture
| file that I have never seen a decoder for (other than the
| decoder (and encoder) that I wrote myself).
|
| Many modern implementations do not support permanent shifts in
| Z versions 3 and above (although all of my own implementations
| do, and I think all of the official implementations also do,
| even though Infocom never used that feature (this isn't too
| surprising since the algorithm they described for deciding when
| to use permanent shifts is worse than not using them at all; I
| worked with someone else to make a better algorithm for making
| this decision)).
|
| Some of the official implementations check the Z version number
| and some don't; even some that do, do not check if it is a
| small-endian story file (and the ones that do will only display
| an error message if it is, and refuse to run it). My own
| implementations do check for small-endian story files (as well
| as the Z version number), although some will display an error
| message and refuse to run it in that case, some actually are
| able to run both big-endian and small-endian story files (as
| far as I know, there are no small-endian story files; Infocom
| never used this feature and no modern compilers support this).
|
| Something else I might mention is that some people say that
| Infocom used many tricks in the programming, although I have
| looked at disassembled code in the debugger and found that they
| could be optimized a lot more (e.g. by using SET->BCOM
| optimization, and many other things), and the source code for
| the interpreters also shows some things that could be optimized
| much better. (Another thing revealed from the source code of
| the interpreters is a undocumented command-line switch for the
| DOS version that allows you to specify the name of the story
| file.)
| ndiddy wrote:
| The source code for most of Infocom's Z-code interpreters
| (including the Apple version) is available here:
| https://github.com/erkyrath/infocom-zcode-terps . Note that
| this isn't an official licensed release so it's in a legal gray
| area. It would be nice to see Microsoft bless these with an
| official license as well.
| raldi wrote:
| 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?
| VikingCoder wrote:
| https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/pull/3
| wg0 wrote:
| Make AoE open source please. I am sure Microsoft Empire won't
| crumble.
| RyanOD wrote:
| 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.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| Ditto here. And, better, translated into Spanish with INFSP6.
| There is one made from a non-native Spanish speaker and it's
| really bad. Now a proper Zork translation can be a reality.
|
| Ah, and yes, IF6 ports for Adventure do exist, both in English
| and Spanish, and the Spanish one it's really great, with even
| the backstory on creating the game perfectly translated..
| LunaSea wrote:
| Waiting impatiently for World of Warcraft to be Open Sourced.
| chickensong wrote:
| Tentatively scheduled for 2051
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Can ZILF just compile this?
|
| https://zilf.io/
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That is the exactly the suggested compiler in this blog post.
| (These repos have been compiled with it for a while. The
| biggest change in these [Internet Archive-uploaded] repos is an
| official Microsoft-backed MIT License as opposed to assuming
| Fair Use for Archival Use prior to now.)
|
| I'm hoping Microsoft may have a chance to open source more of
| the original Infocom compilers and VMs, even if they would be
| hard to run on modern machines, in later expansions of these
| repos.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Zilf liked it, but Zapf is flagged by Windows 11 Smart App
| Control as potentially dangerous to my machine...
|
| And there's no way to turn it off for one app.
|
| And if I turn it off, I can only turn it back on by re-
| installing Windows.
|
| What the bloody...
|
| So now I want to download and build.
|
| But it's .net 10, so I apparently need VS 2026, which I
| hadn't bothered to install yet.
|
| Oh my.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| When EA recently made Command & Conquer free software, it was
| clear that the various art assets were not covered under this.
|
| Is there something similar for a text based adventure game? Does
| the writing count as code?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The writing should be assumed to be subject to copyright still
| even though the code is open source.
|
| In this case it _sounds_ like Microsoft 's Legal has taken the
| assumption the writing is applicable under the code license and
| is mostly seeking to enforce _trademarks_ and _brand_ (don 't
| commercially release something implying it is a Microsoft-
| approved Zork) more than the writing, per Scott's wording of
| Microsoft's legal requests here:
| https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/pull/3
|
| Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, that's not legal advice, build
| commercial derivatives at your own risk and with your own
| lawyer's advice.
| BryantD wrote:
| The repository is part of https://github.com/historicalsource,
| which has code for a bunch of Infocom games, although at a quick
| glance most of them aren't open sourced. Still, very cool
| resource.
| MrZongle2 wrote:
| The cynic in me believes that this only took place after numerous
| meetings during which the question "is there any way we can still
| make money from this" was repeatedly answered with "no".
| fainpul wrote:
| My guess is they wanted to create some good publicity for once,
| to distract from all the shit they get for their AI stunts and
| Windows fuckups.
| jamesgill wrote:
| I kinda hate that Microsoft gets to take credit for being
| magnanimous with yet another product they never created.
|
| The TL;DR: The Zorks were created by several guys at MIT who
| later formed Infocom. Infocom eventually sold to Activision,
| Microsoft bought Activision and voila--"Microsoft is open
| sourcing Zork".
| dsjoerg wrote:
| They're not taking credit for the product; they're taking
| credit for _open-sourcing_ it. Which they did.
| jamesgill wrote:
| Yes, I get it. It's right there in the headline.
| thebeardisred wrote:
| Easter egg from back in the day - (podman|docker) run -it
| quay.io/games/zork
| doener wrote:
| If you ask Claude to simulate Zork you get a text adventure that
| is loosely based on Zork, but entirely different.
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