Preservation for games has become an important topic in this era of digital-only releases and games-as-a-service. So it’s amazing to win big collecting a trio of original text games that have been around for centuries. Microsoft announced today that the code for Zork, zork ii And Zork III Will be made available open source under the MIT license. The company’s Open Source Programs Office, Xbox, and Activision all contributed to the effort. “The goal is not to modernize Zork but to preserve it as a place for exploration and education,” Microsoft team members wrote in a blog post sharing the news.
They are works worth studying. First Zork Parser was a milestone moment for games that still inspires the current interactive fiction community. Not only was it a unique experience of narrative and puzzles, but the achievements of the Z-Machine virtual machine that ran it helped create Zork It was readily available to players on multiple platforms during the rise of personal computers in the 1990s. There are still modern Z-Machine interpreters out there (or you can buy and play all three Zork titles in the normal way thanks to the same preservation-minded folks at Good Old Games).
Code for several well-known text games created by Infocom was released on GitHub in 2019, but the rights still technically belonged to Activision, which could have released a takedown. This move keeps the code for this iconic Zork game available for ages.