Microsoft announced today that they’re preserving a bit of history here - with Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III now officially and clearly open source. The source has been around for a while but now it’s all proper.
From the announcement they said:
Today, we’re preserving a cornerstone of gaming history that is near and dear to our hearts. Together, Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), Team Xbox, and Activision are making Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III available 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.
FOSS games using Zork source code: NEW IDEAS FROM SCRATCH!
from Zork 1Is this the one where you get eaten by a grue?
Only if the lights are out.
Off to Frobozz I go, I guess
When I first started playing D&D 30 fucking years ago I used to take my hand drawn maps of Zork to school and use those as dungeon maps for my friends and I to play on in the back of class. Goddamn its been a long time, but I owe A LOT to Zork.
I’d forgotten about those games. Played a little in college in the 80s.
Are games with semantic text input any fun? They look like they’d be tremendously frustrating as a modern gamer. I guess you need to learn the language it’s looking for?
I liked them but I also grew up with Choose Your Own Adventure books. You might try some of the hybrid games like Kings Quest that have graphics and use arrow keys but also use a parser for input.
I unfortunately don’t have much time to play games.
I’ve tried Zork a few times, but I always get stuck near some clearing, and I don’t know where to go. Basically at the start.
Anyway, curiosity combined with imagination, yeah, could be fun.
Main reason I haven’t tried it is pretty stupid. I don’t know how to save and reset, otherwise Zork is also on our SDF pubnix. But I also didn’t really go out looking. You can try it without sign-up on telehack.com. Also, why the hell can’t I run telnet (freezes or takes long time to respond) on Arch + KDE in terminal emulator (I tried 2), but it works in TTY?
And a list of many BBSs: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
I’ll give them a shot, thank you.
I learned how to “write” in Grafiti for my Palm Pilot, and I’ve learned how to best phrase my searches, so I can learn this.
So can I get the solution to Zork on the C64 now :-D
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