Microsoft releases the source code for Zork I, II, III

There are several things interesting about Zork. It was one of the earliest imagination games that didn't have set winning conditions, instead you explored and tried to figure things out. It also was perhaps the first multi-platform games. They developed the Z-Machine, sort of a virtual environment that allowed the game to run on IBM Dos machines, Apple IIs, and others. That was extraordinarily revolutionary for the time!

And now you can download the source code for free. You can also download Z-Machine implementations for free. There's also CRT emulators that you can download if you really want to go 1980s old school!

And if you don't want to bother with all that, you can buy the game at Good Old Games for $6, but it's Windows-only.

One thing that I'm kind of curious about, though: when did Microsoft acquire the rights to Infocom IP? I don't recall that. While this is a cool thing for Microsoft to do, the source code for Zork and pretty much all the other Infocom games has been available for a few years, I downloaded them ages ago.

https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/20/preserving-code-that-shaped-generations-zork-i-ii-and-iii-go-open-source

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/20/1942250/microsoft-open-sources-classic-text-adventure-zork-trilogy