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.
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.