Beware of Underground Trolls: Originally released for PDP 10 mainframe computers in 1977, Zork became a cultural and commercial phenomenon at the dawn of the home computing revolution. Now, Redmond is placing this historically important game series back in the hands of developers.
Microsoft recently introduced its latest effort in digital game preservation by making Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III available under the MIT license. Turning the main Zork trilogy into an open source project will make sure students, teachers, and developers can study the original code, play the games, and perhaps even create something new from it.
Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office worked with the Xbox team, Activision developers, and Jason Scott, a digital archivist at the Internet Archive, to prepare the source code that was later submitted to the Historical Source collection on GitHub. Scott had already uploaded Zork's source code to GitHub in 2019, at a time when there was no proper way to obtain a licensed copy of the game.
Activision became the owner of Zork after acquiring Infocom, while Microsoft is now in possession of all Activision assets and brands. The new versions of Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III on GitHub are officially provided by Microsoft, which means future license or trademark issues should no longer be a concern.
Microsoft highlights that Zork is an exceptionally influential part of gaming history, both for the interactive fiction genre and the industry as a whole. Successful interactive fiction required clever writing as well as thoughtful engineering, and Zork had an abundance of both. The original PDP 10 game was divided into three separate titles by Infocom developers, and these were released for various home computers and personal computing platforms between 1980 and 1982.
The "revolutionary" idea behind Zork was the Z-Machine, a custom-built engine that functioned as a dedicated virtual machine. Developers would compile a single "story file" version of every IF adventure, and a platform-specific Z-Machine interpreter would make the game instantly playable on different systems.
The first three Zork games sold more than 680,000 copies through 1986, establishing Infocom as a major studio in the interactive fiction genre and in the early home gaming market. The saga is universally regarded as a foundation of the adventure game genre, and a massive influence to modern commercial trends such as massively multiplayer online RPGs.
The source code released on GitHub can be compiled into a story file to run in some modern versions of Infocom's Z-Machine, Microsoft explains. Meanwhile, the easily "playable" version of the Zork saga continues to be commercially available on GOG.com and other digital stores.
"Zork has always been more than a game. It is a reminder that imagination and engineering can outlast generations of hardware and players," said Microsoft OSPO director Stacey Haffner.