The influential text-based adventure game, Zork, along with its sequels Zork II and Zork III, is now available as open source under the MIT License. This development comes through a collective effort by the Xbox and Activision teams in collaboration with Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). Microsoft, the parent company, holds the intellectual rights to the Zork franchise.
While the source code of these classic games is now open source, commercial packaging, marketing materials, and associated trademarks and brands remain proprietary.
In a joint announcement, Stacy Haffner, Director of Microsoft's OSPO, and Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community, explained that rather than creating new repositories, they have contributed to historical ones. Working with renowned digital archivist Jason Scott, they have submitted pull requests to the original source repositories of Zork I, II, and III, including a formal MIT License that documents the open-source grant.
Microsoft assumed control of the Zork intellectual property following its acquisition of Activision in 2022. Activision had previously acquired it when it bought original publisher Infocom in the late 1980s. Interestingly, there was an attempt to sell Zork rights to Microsoft in the early 1980s, owing to founder Bill Gates' fondness for the game, although it didn't come to fruition at that time.
It's worth noting that this is not the first instance of the Zork source code being made publicly available. Jason Scott had uploaded it to GitHub in 2019, but at that time, the licensing status had been unclear, leaving room for potential takedown requests from Activision or Microsoft. The recent move ensures that such risks are no longer a concern.