A developer successfully runs the classic text-based game Zork on the Intel 4004, the first commercially available microprocessor, demonstrating the game's portability and pushing the limits of early computing hardware.
The source code for Infocom's text-parsing adventure games, including Zork, has been discovered in a GitHub repository. The code, written in the Zork Implementation Language, was designed to be interpreted on various systems using the Z-Machine. While the source code doesn't contain many revealing comments, it provides insights into the challenges of developing commercial software in the 1980s. The owner of the repository is currently negotiating with Microsoft, the current rights-holder, to open-source Infocom's work.
Interpreters for Zork, the popular 1977 text adventure game, have recently surfaced online for classic 1980s machines. Zork is not a PDP-10 executable but a virtual machine executable, run by an interpreter written for the PDP-10. The game was compiled into "Z-machine" program files called ZIP, and while the compiler has not been released, the language and ZIP specifications have allowed for the creation of custom ZIP compilers. Additionally, there are other types of interpreters, such as programming languages that are interpreted directly from source code.