Microsoft has made classic text adventures Zork and its sequels open source. The original trilogy (which is actually one huge game that developer Infocom split into three parts) is now available under an MIT License.

Microsoft acquired the licence to Zork when it purchased Activision, which in turn nabbed the IP when it bought Infocom back in the '80s. The move to make Zork open source is a combined project between Microsoft, the Xbox Team, and Activision, while Jason Scott, a digital archivist at the Internet Archive, was also involved.

Code repositories for Zork, Zork 2 and Zork 3 already exist on Github, having been submitted anonymously several years back. In a blog explaining its decision to make Zork open source, Microsoft says that rather than create new repositories, it has "officially submitted upstream pull requests to the historical source repositories" which "add a clear MIT License and formally document the open-source grant."

Microsoft also points out that the license related only to the source code, and "does not include commercial packaging or marketing materials".

It's a welcome move. However, Microsoft's announcement about making Zork open-source sure has the whiff of AI-generated writing about it. The article is riddled with saccharine, dreamy phrasing and AI-favoured sentence structures. "When Zork arrived, it didn't just ask players to win; it asked them to imagine" is a classic bit of AI-generated hokum, and similar phrases occur multiple times through the text.

Given how the article itself praises Zork's writing, saying its words "built worlds more vivid than most games of their time" using AI to slop out an article about it doesn't seem very respectful. Nor does using a technology notorious for plagiarism to write about how important the particularities of licensing are. To be clear, I don't think the whole text is AI generated, but I'd bet that it's been run through an AI system at some point.

But that's just my opinion. This wouldn't be the first time that Zork and generative AI have intersected. A couple of years back, Google tried running Zork's text through an image diffusion model to see how it interpreted what Zork's world might look like. At the time, PC Gamer's Rich Stanton pondered whether we'd see this version of Zork as an actual release, though it doesn't seem to have happened so far.