But they have made two significant historical contributions to open source software recently. Back in September they open-sourced the original version of Microsoft Basic, which was partly written by Bill Gates himself as a teenager. Here’s the announcement on Microsoft’s Open Source blog, and here’s the GitHub repository with the code. It’s worth noting that Bill Gates was long vocal against the principles of free code sharing, and his arguments in favor of commercialization of computer software are partly responsible for our current capitalist hellscape, but I guess better very late than never, eh what?

More recently, as in the 20th of this month, Microsoft announced that they were officially opening the source code for the three Zork games. The copyright for them passed into their holding by their acquisition of Activision. If you have a time machine, it’d be a fun trick to go back to the founding of Activision and tell them about the later history of their company, although in doing so you might cause them to give up their efforts in despair.

It must be said that Microsoft didn’t publish the source code to the Zork games; instead, they gave their official blessing to Jason Scott and the Internet Archive’s efforts to preserve it. They did that by adding documents to the GitHub repositories for Zork I, Zork II and Zork III. The source code takes the form of ZIL files, code written in the Zork Implementation Language to be compiled into object files compatible with Infocom’s Z Machine interpreter, so if you want to understand what that means, I suggest Andrew Plotkin’s introduction, What Is ZIL Anyway?

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Infocom tried different things to diversify, like a weird computer and board game called Fooblitzky, and an office software package called Cornerstone. In the end they got bought out by Activision, which had renamed itself to “Mediagenic.” But that’s a story for another time.

There was a period where earlier Implementors, or “imps,” had left the company, so it was left to remaining employee Steve Meretzsky, the creator of the afore-mentioned Planetfall, and co-author with Douglas Adams of the Hitchhiker’s Guide game, to write a manual to tell new hires how to use their bespoke development tool, ZIL, to make text adventure games.

This is that manual (78 pages), preserved on the Internet Archive. And it’s great! Steve had made multiple successful games with it and knew his stuff. He didn’t know everything about it, and at multiple points appeals to a mystery Stu, who was probably Stu Galley, fellow imp. We don’t know if he ever filled in those holes when talking to people. Stu passed away in 2018, so I guess it’s a moot point now.

Meretzky is a fine and funny writer, and his personality shines through the document. And he’s a good teacher too, I feel like I could use this to make games with ZIL, while Inform 7, while I understand it is also great and has extensive documentation with lots of examples, I couldn’t handle.

ZIL is a Lisp-like language, where everything is lists. It compiles to “Z-code,” a virtual machine that was run by Infocom’s interpreter (which is the secret of their many ports to different computer platforms of that era), and of which there are now many different free and open source ports like Frotz and Gargoyle. So you could use this to write a ZIL game, use ZILF and ZAPF to build it, and run it in Frotz. As Exercise Three in the manual, Meretzsky tasks the read with building a complete game, collaborating with the Infocom marketing department to design a box for it, and then selling 250,000 copies. That’s pretty difficult since Infocom is gone and it’s essentially impossible now to sell text adventures for money. Maybe you’ll find a way.

Learning ZIL, or, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Writing Interactive Fiction But Couldn’t Find Anyone Still Working Here To Ask (Internet Archive, PDF)

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Infocom was bought by Activision, used as a brand for a number of weird titles like an NES game, and eventually the Zork name would be applied to a pair of Windows graphic adventures. The property currently lies dormant in the hands of an uncarring megacorp, along with many other old computer game settings, characters and properties from over the proliferating decades of time since Pong.

Anyway. SwimYBO’s playthroughs go through the entire game and reveal all the puzzles and solutions, but they do leave some of the descriptions and game lore unrevealed for a player who might come to them later.

Zork I (“The Great Underground Empire,” 29 minutes):

Zork II (“The Wizard of Frobozz,” 30 minutes):

And Zork III (“The Dungeon Master,” 34 minutes):

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When we left off last time, Marc Blank and Joel Berez were considering how to bring Zork to the microcomputer. Really, they were trying to solve three interrelated problems. At the risk of being pedantic, let me lay out them for you:

1. How to get Zork, a massive game that consumed 1 MB of memory on the PDP-10, onto their chosen minimum microcomputer system, an Apple II or TRS-80 with 32 K of RAM and a single floppy-disk drive.

2. How to do so in a portable way that would make it as painless as possible to move Zork not only to the Apple II and TRS-80 but also, if all went well, to many more current and future mutually incompatible platforms.

3. How to use the existing MDL source code to Zork as the basis for the new microcomputer version, rather than having to start all over again and implement the game from scratch in some new environment.

The Digital Antiquarian

The Digital Antiquarian: ZIL and the Z-Machine

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