Zork officially open sourced

[Cmaier]

Microsoft makes Zork I, II, and III open source under MIT License

Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office worked with Jason Scott to do it.

arstechnica.com

The source code was already floating around, but the license situation was unclear. Not looking forward to someone embedding an LLM in it…

 

[Nycturne]

Microsoft makes Zork I, II, and III open source under MIT License

Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office worked with Jason Scott to do it.

arstechnica.com

The source code was already floating around, but the license situation was unclear. Not looking forward to someone embedding an LLM in it…

Eh, if it was more of a SLM built to actually guide you towards actions you can perform, or make guesses if "grab that thing on the ground" actually means "pick up gizmo" as a way to make some of these games less obtuse, it might be interesting.

Doing a sort of AI Dungeon take on it, less so.

 

[Cmaier]

Eh, if it was more of a SLM built to actually guide you towards actions you can perform, or make guesses if "grab that thing on the ground" actually means "pick up gizmo" as a way to make some of these games less obtuse, it might be interesting.

Doing a sort of AI Dungeon take on it, less so.

part of the fun playing this (when i was 8) was finding new commands that it actually understood.

 

[Nycturne]

Honestly, I'm thinking a bit about the Infocom titles Douglas Adams wrote, which were "hard" specifically because the commands and puzzles were super obtuse, and the game would just kill you when you guessed too much. I just never had the patience for some of these types of games as a kid as a result.

Moonmist was one of my favorites though. Specifically because the mystery had a few variations and so there was some replay value baked in.

 

[Cmaier]

Zork was the first computer game I ever played. On the TRS-80 in our elementary school that I was allowed to play with because I got into the school district’s first computer class, which met mornings an hour before the normal school day. There was a single TRS-80, and we’d take turns. The teacher had no idea how computers worked and her understanding of computer programming amounted to line numbering and the print command. But Zork was fun!

 

[Nycturne]

My earliest stuff was all on our Apple II+. Apple Cider Spider, Frogger, Miner 2049er (that was a brutal game), etc. Lode Runner was probably my favorite there. Funny thing is that I picked up a bunch of old Apple II disks from my father earlier this year, as I recently came into ownership of a Quadra 605 and Apple IIe card, and wanted to see how many disks still read. And lo and behold: my disk of bad Lode Runner levels from when I was like 6-7 still read fine.

It was when we started going to the local swap meet around 1991(?) and we could occasionally find some neat games for 5-10$ on floppy disks for the SE/30 that I was introduced to Infocom. I remember the first thing we did after buying anything was run Disinfectant on the disk. And we did actually find a couple viruses that way.