Zork is now open source

Liam Dawe for Gaming on Linux tells us that Zork I, Zork II and Zork III are now officially open source:

They didn’t put up their own repositories though, instead they decided to collaborate with Jason Scott of the Internet Archive, to officially send in pull requests to add the MIT license to each of the existing repositories.

The source code for Zork I, II and III has been available for a while, preserved for history, without a license. Now it’s official. Microsoft, who acquired Activision in 2022, worked with documentary filmmaker and archivist extradordinaire Jason Scott to make it MIT licensed. These are just the sources written in ZIL (Zork Implementation Language) which isn’t included here. Albeit there is an open-source implementation of the Z-Machine interpreter as ZILF.

Zork has had an extraodrinary influence in the early of computer gaming and interactive fiction, and it was the subject of Get Lamp, a documentary by Jason Scott.

Ars Technica also note that Microsoft makes Zork I, II, and III open source under MIT License .