Last week, Microsoft made the classic games Zork, Zork II, and Zork III available as open source under the MIT license.
“Our goal is simple: to place historically important code in the hands of students, teachers, and developers so they can study it, learn from it, and, perhaps most importantly, play it,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post.
Open-sourcing classic games is one way to preserve them for the future, allowing people to keep experiencing them even after their original builds are no longer supported on modern machines.
These three Zork text-based adventure games from Infocom pioneered interactive fiction and ran on the early Z-Machine engine. This allowed them to be widely distributed in the 1980s and 90s pre-internet.
Note that the games’ commercial packaging, marketing materials, and trademarks remain protected by copyright! The games’ source code are what have been made freely available.
