Microsoft Open-Sources Classic Text Adventure Zork Trilogy (microsoft.com)
- Reference: 0180156683
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/20/1942250/microsoft-open-sources-classic-text-adventure-zork-trilogy
- Source link: https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/20/preserving-code-that-shaped-generations-zork-i-ii-and-iii-go-open-source
The games arrived on early home computers in the 1980s as text-based adventures built on the Z-Machine, a virtual machine that allowed the same story files to run across different platforms. Infocom created the Z-Machine after discovering the original mainframe version was too large for home computers. The team split the game into three titles that all ran on the same underlying system.
The code release covers only the source files and does not include commercial packaging or trademark rights. The games remain available commercially through The Zork Anthology on Good Old Games and can be compiled locally using ZILF, a modern Z-Machine interpreter.
[1] https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/20/preserving-code-that-shaped-generations-zork-i-ii-and-iii-go-open-source
Memories... (Score:2)
A large part of the experience was as a frustrating guessing game. There's no interpretation at all, so you have to put the exact string it is expecting to accomplish a task or action. And if you have no idea what that is, it can take hours or days to figure it out. And a whole lot of it was completely un-obvious. Invariably you rely on someone else who had figured out how to get past a certain part. It was a group effort.
The themes and the writing were cool. The experience of actually playing through
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed, I wrote me a front-end for Gemstone III on Compuserve to automate all that crap with key combos.
You never had a chance against the hundreds of other people who could actually TYPE.:-)
Re: (Score:2)
You may be thinking of a different text-based adventure. The Infocom titles did have a pretty robust sentence parser for user input (although it was not robust in the face of misspellings). The puzzles, though, could indeed be frustrating if your mindset was not well-aligned with the game writer's.
Appears to be a legal release only (Score:2)
This code was made available (if less than lawfully, nobody who matters complained) over ten years ago; I believe the conclusion of that story is [1]here [textfiles.com].
[1] https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4848
The source is there? (Score:4, Funny)
I thought that the source got eaten by a Grue.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps Zork's predecessor, Adventure ?