Microsoft makes Zork open-source

Microsoft makes Zork open-source (opensource.microsoft.com)

tabletcorry

624 points

drob518

When I was 14 or so, in the early 1980s, a friend and I who had been playing Zork thought it would be fun to design a game ourselves. We actually wrote to Infocom with a proposal that we write a new game for them and they let us use ZIL and the Z-machine to implement it. Surprisingly, they actually wrote back to us and politely declined our offer. In hindsight, while we knew how to program in BASIC and assembly language on our Apple IIs, we would have been lost making a game with ZIL. That’s to say that Infocom made the right call. Still, it said something about the company that they treated a couple kids with respect and didn’t laugh in our faces. I wish I still had the letter.

reticulated

2 days ago

My goodness, I could have written this word-for-word. Similar age, same Apple II BASIC and 6502 upbringing (roll sleeves and call -151) and also wrote to Infocom. We were in the UK so even more surprised to get a reply similar to yours several weeks later. Sadly my letter is also lost to various house moves. Or eaten by a grue.

drob518

2 days ago

Ha! They probably assigned an intern to reply to all the kids wanting to help them write the “next one.” Too funny! They had class, Infocom did.

DonHopkins

2 days ago

I wrote them, and after a while I received a brochure in my mailbox, with this stamp:

    ---v----v----v----v----v---
    |         _______         |
    >  One   /       \     G  <
    | Lousy /         \    U  |
    > Point |   ___   |    E  <
    |       |  (___)  |       |
    >       <--)___(-->    P  <
    |       / /     \ \    o  |
    >      / /       \ \   s  <
    |     |-|---------|-|  t  |
    >     | |  \ _ /  | |  a  <
    |     | | --(_)-- | |  g  |
    >     | |  /| |\  | |  e  <
    |     |-|---|_|---|-|     |
    >      \ \__/_\__/ /      <
    |       _/_______\_       |
    >      |  f.m.l.c. |      <
    |      -------------      |
    >                         <
    |   Donald Woods, Editor  |
    >     Spelunker Today     <
    |                         |
    ---^----^----^----^----^---

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114927

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8Z1cKUxD9c

https://crpgadventures.blogspot.com/2016/05/zork-victory-sor...

bryanlarsen

2 days ago

Me too, except my letter was to Sierra On-Line and my experience was on TRS-80 6809. Really classy reply asking me to write back when I finished school.

chihuahua

2 days ago

In the 1980s, I was interested in text adventure games, and had a kind of book/magazine on the topic of how to write them. In BASIC, obviously (groan) because that's what was easily accessible back then.

I remember figuring out the mechanisms that the book introduced: what kind of rudimentary data structures to use to represent the state of the world, the locations of objects, etc.

I got some simple stuff to work, you could navigate the world, pick up and drop objects, etc. but then my motivation gradually ran out because I didn't have a clearly defined design for the game I was going to build.

I had a few pirated games (C64, Amiga): "Death in the Caribbean", "The Pawn", etc but never had the motivation to stick with them past the first or second puzzle. The puzzles seemed like if the answer didn't arrive via a flash of divine inspiration, there was no way to figure it out based on logical reasoning. Maybe that part of my brain wasn't developed back then.

noduerme

a day ago

That's really nice. I remember when I was 8 or so, I phoned up NASA and told them I'd drawn up plans for a spaceship. The lady on the phone sweetly took me very seriously and asked questions about where such a thing would launch (answer: any big airport). She encouraged me to send them in.

Around the same time (1988) my best friend and I started making our first game in HyperCard. Getting more immediate results from that is probably how I ended up a SWE instead of in aerospace.

jmward01

2 days ago

'as a kid I....' Man. This brings back memories. I got into the BBS world and started programming in earnest because I wanted to write shells for the MUDs out at the time. A friend and I built some amazing things all in the name of auto-mapping, adding graphics, etc etc. Simple games really help confine a problem to the point that you can grow your curiosity easily with them.

RyanOD

2 days ago

This literally gave me goosebumps. It's hard to convey how much Zork (and the rest of the Infocom portfolio) means to me. This was my first entry into gaming on my Commodore 64.

For anyone out there who had anything to do with bringing these games to market, know that you impacted so many lives in a fun, meaningful, heartfelt way.

mike1o1

2 days ago

https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1 Direct link to the repository

bluedino

2 days ago

I've seen a few things called 'Zork source code' in various places over the years (even on a CD that came with a game programming book of some sort), and copies like this:

https://github.com/MITDDC/zork

What's the lineage here?

MPSimmons

2 days ago

I like playing Zork via docker: https://github.com/clockworksoul/docker-zork1

> docker run -it clockworksoul/zork1

AdmiralAsshat

2 days ago

Why does Microsoft own the rights to Zork?

BryantD

2 days ago

The repository is part of https://github.com/historicalsource, which has code for a bunch of Infocom games, although at a quick glance most of them aren't open sourced. Still, very cool resource.