{"id":304330,"date":"2025-11-21T02:07:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T02:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/304330\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T02:07:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T02:07:09","slug":"microsoft-has-open-sourced-the-zork-trilogy-of-text-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/304330\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft has open sourced the Zork trilogy of text games"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"col-body mb-4 leading-7 text-[18px] md:leading-8 break-words min-w-0 charcoal-color\">Preservation has become a pressing topic for games in this era of <a class=\"link \" href=\"https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/gaming\/the-stop-killing-games-movement-is-nearing-an-official-meeting-with-eu-lawmakers-191535413.html\" data-i13n=\"cpos:1;pos:1\" data-ylk=\"slk:digital-only releases;cpos:1;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">digital-only releases<\/a> and games-as-a-service. So it&#8217;s wonderful to have a big win in archiving a trio of seminal text games for the ages. Microsoft <a class=\"link \" href=\"https:\/\/opensource.microsoft.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/20\/preserving-code-that-shaped-generations-zork-i-ii-and-iii-go-open-source\" data-i13n=\"cpos:2;pos:1\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" data-ylk=\"slk:announced;cpos:2;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\">announced<\/a> today that the code for Zork, Zork II and Zork III will be made available open source under the MIT License. The company&#8217;s Open Source Programs Office, Xbox and Activision all contributed to the effort. &#8220;The goal is not to modernize Zork but to preserve it as a space for exploration and education,&#8221; Microsoft team members wrote in the blog post sharing the news.<\/p>\n<p class=\"col-body mb-4 leading-7 text-[18px] md:leading-8 break-words min-w-0 charcoal-color\">They&#8217;re works well-worth studying. The first Zork was a milestone moment for parser games that still inspires the present-day interactive fiction community. Not only was it a unique experience of narrative and puzzles, but the accomplishments of the Z-Machine virtual machine it ran on helped make Zork easily 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 the normal way thanks to the <a class=\"link \" href=\"https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/gaming\/pc\/gogs-preservation-label-highlights-classic-games-its-maintaining-for-modern-hardware-231606454.html\" data-i13n=\"cpos:3;pos:1\" data-ylk=\"slk:similarly preservation-minded folks;cpos:3;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">similarly preservation-minded folks<\/a> at Good Old Games).<\/p>\n<p class=\"col-body mb-4 leading-7 text-[18px] md:leading-8 break-words min-w-0 charcoal-color\">The code for many famous text games made by Infocom was released on GitHub <a class=\"link \" href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gaming\/2019\/04\/you-can-now-download-the-source-code-for-all-infocom-text-adventure-classics\/\" data-i13n=\"cpos:4;pos:1\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" data-ylk=\"slk:in 2019;cpos:4;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\">in 2019<\/a>, but the rights still technically belonged to Activision, which could have issued a takedown. This move keeps the code for this iconic Zork games available for the ages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Preservation has become a pressing topic for games in this era of digital-only releases and games-as-a-service. So it&#8217;s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304331,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[36259,1281,158019,74,158020,158022,158021],"class_list":["post-304330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-activision","tag-microsoft","tag-seminal-text-games","tag-technology","tag-text-games","tag-zork","tag-zork-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}