Microsoft has made classic text adventures Zork and its sequels open source. The original trilogy (which is actually one huge game that developer Infocom split into three parts) is now available under an MIT License.
Microsoft acquired the licence to Zork when it purchased Activision, which in turn nabbed the IP when it bought Infocom back in the ’80s. The move to make Zork open source is a combined project between Microsoft, the Xbox Team, and Activision, while Jason Scott, a digital archivist at the Internet Archive, was also involved.
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Given how the article itself praises Zork’s writing, saying its words “built worlds more vivid than most games of their time” using AI to slop out an article about it doesn’t seem very respectful. Nor does using a technology notorious for plagiarism to write about how important the particularities of licensing are. To be clear, I don’t think the whole text is AI generated, but I’d bet that it’s been run through an AI system at some point.
But that’s just my opinion. This wouldn’t be the first time that Zork and generative AI have intersected. A couple of years back, Google tried running Zork’s text through an image diffusion model to see how it interpreted what Zork’s world might look like. At the time, PC Gamer’s Rich Stanton pondered whether we’d see this version of Zork as an actual release, though it doesn’t seem to have happened so far.
Read the full article here
