Respect to the guy for uploading the source code while in active negotiations with Microsoft to release the source code.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Most of Infocom’s games were written in “Zork Implementation Language,” which was native to no particular platform or processor, but ready to be interpreted on all kinds of systems by versions of its Z-Machine.

Lots of work has been done in open source realms to create modern, and improved, versions of these interpreters for pretty much every device imaginable.

The source code for these Z-Machine implementations (virtual machines, in today’s parlance) appeared like a grue from the dark a few days ago in a GitHub repository owned by Andrew Plotkin.

Plotkin, a major figure in modern and classic text adventure realms (and lots in between), details what they are and how he found them in a blog post on his site.

As Plotkin notes, the interpreter source code doesn’t have a lot of interesting, personal, or other revealing comments or artifacts.

The Hackaday blog previously dug into the details of the Z-Machine and how it brought DEC PDP-10 games to TRS-80s and other home computers.

The original article contains 581 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!