The history of the game Zork is a long and winding one, starting with MUDs and kin on university mainframes – where students entertained themselves in between their studies – and ending…
As the readme states, you can’t actually compile the source code. The compilers are lost to time and it’s from a very obscure, proprietary fork of an obscure language. Essentially, this headline should read “Microsoft owns code not even their engineers could comprehend, so they released it for free since they couldn’t possibly make money from it”.
To be fair, Zork is also just a simple text-based adventure game. I’m not even sure what could be learned by looking at its source code unless you wanted to learn that obscure, proprietary forked language itself. Text-based adventures are little more than spicy Hello World programs. 🤷♂️
But… Why? I don’t trust them, what do they want?
As the readme states, you can’t actually compile the source code. The compilers are lost to time and it’s from a very obscure, proprietary fork of an obscure language. Essentially, this headline should read “Microsoft owns code not even their engineers could comprehend, so they released it for free since they couldn’t possibly make money from it”.
To be fair, Zork is also just a simple text-based adventure game. I’m not even sure what could be learned by looking at its source code unless you wanted to learn that obscure, proprietary forked language itself. Text-based adventures are little more than spicy Hello World programs. 🤷♂️
It is very dark, you are likely to be eaten by a grue. Or profiled by Microsoft.