The Return of a Legendary Text Adventure
One of the most important names in gaming history is suddenly back in the spotlight. Microsoft has made the original Zork trilogy open source, giving everyone a chance to peek inside the code that helped define interactive fiction.
If you have never played it, Zork is a classic text adventure from the early days of PC gaming. There are no fancy graphics. The entire experience happens through written descriptions and your typed commands. Yet it was so ambitious that the original design was split into three games Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III even though they were all parts of one huge adventure.
Now those three games are available under the MIT License, one of the most permissive open source licenses around. That means the source code is free to study, modify, and build on, as long as people follow the simple license terms.
This move is the result of a team up between Microsoft, the Xbox team, and Activision. Jason Scott, a well known digital archivist at the Internet Archive, also helped with the project. It is a surprisingly modern collaboration around one of the oldest digital adventures.
How Microsoft Open Sourced Zork
Zork has had a slightly tangled corporate journey. The game was originally created by Infocom in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Later, Activision bought Infocom and with it the Zork intellectual property. Fast forward a few decades, and Microsoft acquired Activision which means Microsoft now controls Zork.
Interestingly, the code for the three Zork games has actually been floating around GitHub for years. Anonymous contributors previously uploaded the original source as historical archives under these repositories:
- Zork 1
- Zork 2
- Zork 3
Instead of making brand new repos and starting fresh, Microsoft decided to work with what was already there. The company submitted official pull requests to those existing historical repositories. In those pull requests, Microsoft added a clear MIT License file and formal documentation to confirm the open source grant.
This approach does two things. First, it respects the preservation work that fans and archivists already did. Second, it gives the community an official green light to use and modify the code without worrying about legal gray areas.
There is an important catch though. The open source license applies only to the source code itself. It does not cover commercial packaging, original marketing materials, or other branded assets. So you can study the code, port it, or experiment with it, but you do not automatically get the rights to resell it in shiny retro boxes or reuse classic promotional art.
Zork, Writing, and the AI Weirdness
Beyond the licensing win, there is an odd twist to this story. Microsoft published a blog post explaining why it chose to open source Zork and celebrating the game’s impact. But the tone of that post raised some eyebrows. The text is full of dreamy, sentimental lines that sound suspiciously like something an AI model would generate.
One example critics pointed out is the line that says Zork did not just ask players to win, it asked them to imagine. That sort of soft, sweeping phrasing shows up throughout the announcement, along with sentence structures that have become extremely common in AI generated writing.
The awkward part is that the same blog post praises Zork’s writing as a major reason the game was so powerful. It notes how the words built worlds more vivid than most games of their time. So using generative AI to talk about careful human writing and the importance of licensing has rubbed some people the wrong way.
Nobody can say for sure exactly how much of Microsoft’s post was written by a human versus edited or polished by an AI tool. But it seems likely that AI was involved at some stage. For a game that is famous for sharp text and clever prose that ironic detail is hard to ignore.
There is another layer to the irony. Generative AI tools have been heavily criticized for plagiarism and blurry boundaries around copyright. Lawsuits have accused some systems of copying artists and photographers without proper permission. So using the same sort of technology to talk about licensing and preservation of a landmark game feels a bit tone deaf to some readers.
On the other hand, this is not the first time Zork has crossed paths with AI experiments. A couple of years ago, Google researchers ran Zork’s text through an image diffusion model to see how an AI would visualize its locations and monsters. The results were an eerie mashup of classic text and modern machine generated art. There was even speculation that this AI visual version of Zork might eventually turn into a playable release although that has not happened yet.
In a strange way, Zork has now become a bridge between eras of computing. It started life as a pure text adventure built by hand on early hardware. Today it is both a preserved open source project and a playground for modern AI tools.
For players and developers, the important part is that Zork’s original code is finally out in the open with a clear modern license. If you are into retro games, game design history, or just want to see how a legendary text adventure was actually built, this is a rare chance to explore the source of a true classic.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/classic-text-adventure-zork-is-going-open-source-but-im-side-eyeing-microsofts-announcement-about-it-hard/
