Infocom games were THE games to play in the late 70’s through the 80’s, featuring such classics as Zork, Planetfall, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

In 2019, Jason Scott posted all the source code for Infocom’s text adventure games.

Infocom’s interpreter source, however, remained obscure. ZIL (or Zork Implementation Language) wasn’t designed with a particular platform in mind but instead could be interpreted to work on a variety of systems using machine-dependent interpreters. The interpreters were well studied by enthusiasts who even made a modern Z-machine specification and an open-source IF interpreters.

That source was largely considered lost, despite Brian Moriarty donating the interpreter code for the TRS-80 Color Computer. That is until a few weeks ago when someone said they had the code and posted the original interpreter source code.

Links:

• https://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/11/infocom-interpreters
• https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-source-code
• Infocom game source: https://github.com/historicalsource/
• Infocom interpreter source: https://github.com/erkyrath/infocom-zcode-terps
• https://www.timeextension.com/news/2023/11/the-source-code-for-infocoms-amazing-code-porting-tools-has-now-been-preserved