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[–] 49 points 11 months ago (6 children)

I didn't even know Microsoft owned Zork lol

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  • [–] 29 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    It's a maze of twisty passages that gets there....

    Infocom was bought by Activision, which later got merged into Activision Blizzard, which Microsoft later bought.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    And apparently Microsoft originally wanted to buy the rights all the way back in the 80s! It only took them 40 years...

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    I am now imagining Microsoft making a new Zork game that is a graphical feast and not at all similar to the OG other than killing you outright if you spend too long in the dark.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I mean, arguably this was done years ago with Return to Zork, Zork: Nemesis, and Zork: Grand Inquisitor. They shared a bit of the humor of the originals, but they were still pretty different.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    But.. Why? I don't trust them, what do they want?

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  • [–] 28 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    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".

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago

    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. 🤷‍♂️

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Sure, though interpreters have already been written for the bytecode language that this source code compiles to. It shouldn’t be too difficult for the community to write a compiler when the back-end interpreter is already there and usable for testing.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago
    [–] -4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Why is everything named so weird

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