Zorkclassic text adventure game incalculable influencewas made available under the MIT license along with sequels Zork II And Zork III.
Step to accept it Zork Open source games are a collaboration between the Xbox and Activision teams, as well as Microsoft's Open Source Program Office (OSPO). Parent company Microsoft owns the franchise's intellectual property.
Only the code itself has become open. Ancillary elements such as commercial packaging and marketing assets and materials remain proprietary, as do the associated trademarks and brands.
“Rather than creating new repositories, we are making direct contributions to history. In collaboration with Jason Scott, a renowned digital archivist known as the Internet Archive, we have formally submitted requests for inclusion in historical sources in the repositories Zork I, Zork IIAnd Zork III. These pull requests add a clear MIT LICENSE and formally document the open source grant,” says the announcement, co-written by Stacy Haffner (Director of OSPO at Microsoft) and Scott Hanselman (VP of Developer Community at the company).
Microsoft gained control of Zork IP when it acquired Activision in 2022; Activision became its owner when it acquired original publisher Infocom in the late 1980s. There was an attempt to sell Zork publishing rights directly to Microsoft even earlier, in the 80s, since founder Bill Gates was a major Zork fan, but it failed, so it's funny that it ended up in the same place.
To be clear, this is not the first time the original Zork the source code was made available to the general public. Scott uploaded this on GitHub in 2019, but the licensing situation was never resolved and Activision or Microsoft could file a takedown request if they wanted.
Now this is obviously no longer in danger of happening.
