Microsoft makes Zork I, II and III of Infocom’s historic editor available as open source. Enough to revive the memory of all those who experienced the beginnings of microcomputing but also a salutary decision for the preservation and study of retro video games.
Emotional moment… You are in a dark room. A prompt flashes “>”. The adventure smells of the cathode ray screen, the Apple II, the beginnings of the micro… Except that this time, it is no longer played only on the keyboard, but also in the source code.
Microsoft has just announced open source publishing sources of Zork I, II and IIIInfocom’s cult games, legendary text adventures that have marked generations of players and shaped the history of interactive fiction. An operation carried out jointly by Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office and the Xbox and Activision teams. Everything is placed under the MIT license, with the original development notes, comments and historical files. In short, a real digital treasure now accessible to all. And a real x-ray of a pioneering studio from the 80s, accessible in just a few clicks.
“Today, we are preserving a pillar of video game history, which is particularly close to our hearts” explain Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman from Microsoft as if to better underline that we are not only talking here about computer code, but about a piece of collective memory.
A monument of interactive fiction dissected in plain language
Zork, for the record, is one of the first great successes of the text adventure game. No 3D, no music, only text, a parser and a lot of imagination. Behind this minimalist facade, however, hid an architecture far ahead of its time: the Z-Machine, a virtual machine designed by Infocom to run “story files” on any type of machine, from Apple II to IBM PCs. This separation between engine and content made Zork one of the first truly cross-platform games, long before it was the norm (come to think of it, 50 years later, it’s still not the norm). The game was initially created on a PDP10 mainframe (just like Microsoft’s famous Basic), in 1977, by Bruce Daniels, Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, and Dave Lebling, four MIT students. The last three founded Infocom in 1979 before officially marketing Zork 1 in 1980.
From unofficial archives to a clear legal status
Those who are most keen on retro-dev know this: a good part of the Infocom sources have already been circulating for several years, following the archiving work carried out by Jason Scott, a key figure in the Internet Archive. The sources of many games, including the Zork trilogy, had been posted on GitHub in 2019, but in a gray area on a legal level: nothing prevented, in theory, the rights holder from requesting their removal.
The new thing is that Microsoft, now owner of the Infocom catalog via the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, has chosen to officially regularize the situation. The publisher has submitted pull requests to these historical repositories to add explicit MIT license, license metadata, and attribution, providing clear permission to study, reuse, and modify Zork I, II, and III code. The brands, commercial packaging and assets remain owners and outside the scope of this opening.
An ideal playground for developers, teachers… and nostalgic CIOs
For developers and teachers, it’s a little early Christmas present. The Zork trilogy will thus officially be able to become the textbook case that it deserves to be, perfectly documented to illustrate very current concepts: specialized virtual machines, content description languages, portability of an engine on several platforms, compromise between hardware constraints and gameplay design. In computer science or game design courses, this code joins the pantheon of projects “to dissect” in the same way as certain OS or historical compilers.
Seen from the IT side, the initiative is also an interesting nod to the issue of software preservation. The approach illustrates how a major player can transform a somewhat dusty IP liability into an educational and community resource, without giving up its commercial rights to the brand. After publishing the 6502 BASIC code earlier in the year, Microsoft is establishing itself as a “curator” of its own software heritage, which is not insignificant at a time when debates on archiving, portability and the obsolescence of application stacks are intensifying.
Play, fork, but above all preserve
Concretely, nothing prevents you from continuing to buy the Zork Anthology on GOG for a ready-to-use experience… But that wouldn’t be fun!
Because it is now possible to recompile these historic moments of microcomputing yourself, from the sources, in particular via tools like ZILF and the numerous Z-Machine interpreters available on all modern platforms.
Microsoft also insists that the objective is not to “modernize” Zork, but to maintain a space for exploration, learning and modest contributions that enrich the understanding of the original code.
Forty-five years after trapping generations of gamers in a “ labyrinth of passages all similar », Zork returns through the front door, that of open source. Good news for retro-gaming fans, but above all a great signal sent to an entire ecosystem: certain treasures of code deserve to be more than tolerated in unofficial archives. They deserve to be officially forwarded, commented on, and yes, sometimes happily forked. Up to you.
Thanks Microsoft.
