Zork is one of the oldest text adventure games first released in 1977 that most of the old timers who worked with computers played at one time or another. Instead of a visual interface or graphics the game relied on textual information and the user gives commands to the system in plain English such as ‘Open Door’, or ‘move left’ etc. It is one of the most famous and popular interactive fiction games around even though it had no graphics, no joystick, and no soundtrack.
I am not old enough to have played the game when it first came out but got to try it out once I was in college. At one point most of the older techies I met and interacted with had played it to the point jokes about meeting a ‘Grue’ (A monster in the game) were common when talking about potentially unknown/maybe dangerous stuff or places.
Till recently even though the source code for Zork was publicly available on GitHub, the license situation was unclear which meant that any derivative works or any attempt to release/work on the game came with a risk of a cease-and-desist order from Microsoft (which owns the copyright for the came) and a potentially expensive lawsuit. But now that is no longer an issue because Microsoft has officially released the source code for Zork I, II, and III as Open Source under the MIT License.
“Rather than creating new repositories, we’re contributing directly to history. In collaboration with Jason Scott, the well-known digital archivist of Internet Archive fame, we have officially submitted upstream pull requests to the historical source repositories of Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III. Those pull requests add a clear MIT LICENSE and formally document the open-source grant,” says the announcement co-written by Stacy Haffner (director of the OSPO at Microsoft) and Scott Hanselman (VP of Developer Community at the company).
– Suramya