By Paul Thurrott
Publication Date: 2025-11-20 22:54:00
Microsoft announced today that it has open sourced the code for the first three Zork text adventure games along with their original build notes, comments, and other historically relevant files, and with clear licensing and attribution.
“Today, we’re preserving a cornerstone of gaming history that is near and dear to our hearts,” Microsoft’s Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman write. “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.”
Inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, the first successful text adventure game for the PDP-10 mainframe computer, developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling created the original Zork games for the PDP-10 as well…
