ZorkThe classic text-based adventure game with incredible impact, with sequels, made available under the MIT License zork ii And Zork III,
steps to take Zork The open source of the games is the result of the shared work of the Xbox and Activision teams with Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). Parent company Microsoft owns the intellectual property for the franchise.
Only the code has been made open source. Ancillary items such as commercial packaging and marketing assets and materials remain proprietary, as do the associated trademarks and brands.
“Instead of creating new repositories, we are contributing directly to history. In collaboration with renowned digital archivist Jason Scott of Internet Archive fame, we have officially submitted upstream pull requests for the historical source repository zork i, zork iiAnd Zork III“Those pull requests add an explicit MIT license and formally document the open-source grant,” said the announcement co-written by Stacey Hafner (director of OSPO at Microsoft) and Scott Hanselman (vice president of developer community at the company),
Microsoft gained control Zork IP when it acquires Activision in 2022; Activision gained ownership of it when it acquired original publisher Infocom in the late 80s. attempted to sell Zork Even in the 80s, publishing rights were directly held by Microsoft, because founder Bill Gates was a big leader. Zork fan, but it fell, so it’s funny it ultimately ended up in the same place.
To be clear, this is not the first time that the original Zork The source code is available to the general public. Jason Scott, above, uploaded it to GitHub in 2019, but the licensing situation was unresolved, and Activision or Microsoft could issue a takedown request if they wanted.
Now apparently there is no danger of this happening.