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.
Pretty cool. They are probably hoping someone can figure out how to compile it. The readme states that it can’t be compiled…
Well, the game uses portable bytecode for the ‘Z-machine’ interpreter, and there are dozens of third-party interpreters for it. You can run these games on your phone, no need to compile them.
The repository had been lying dormant for roughly six years.