Wednesday 17 April 2019

Zork Source Code Online - the Holy Grail of Text Adventures!

Anyone who knows me (or reads my articles or follows my programming courses) can't fail to have noticed that I am passionate about text adventures. In fact, it was the old Infocom text adventures such as Zork, Starcross and Trinity that first got me interested in programming, long, long ago. So interested, in fact, that I wrote my own adventure, The Golden Wombat Of Destiny.

The one thing I never expected to see was the source code of the classic Infocom games. Well, today, that all changed. Because the code is now online. I don't honestly know if this is in the public domain or not. I think that theoretically Activision 'owns' the code but clearly the company is doing nothing at all with it. That being so, this great treasure of programming really should be available to inspire and instruct coders old and new. You may need to be dedicated, however. This is not written in any mainstream language such as Java or C. It's written in ZIL (and MDL) which are variants of LISP.

More information here: