https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language)

https://the-rosebush.com/2025/07/studies-of-zil-part-2-how-d...

('ADVENT' is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure , for anyone who isn't familar.)

It was public already, what they are doing here is open sourcing the code.

https://mordenstar.com/zork

But the older version has a "Tomb of the Unknown Implementor," which this new version seems to lack.

The source you're linking to is the original MDL source. This is about the ZIL source for the three games that the original Zork was split into.

the date on the Zork archive you linked to is 1977. in 1977 there was not really yet a notable software market for personal computers based on microcomputer chips, and software development at MIT in that timeframe would have been on Multics or DEC-10 or 20's and (probably not quite) the dawn of Vax-750s

just a couple years later the names on the archive you linked to went on to found infocom to sell this software ported to personal computers, Apple II 6502's or CPM S-100 bus 8080 and Z80s.

the Colossol Cave Adventure game for the PDP-10 had been released (to other institutions that had PDP-10's) just a couple years before and had caught fire in popularity at universities. These people at MIT took the same idea and reimplemented it with embellishments.

"This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, allowing researchers and students to study how code was made for these interactive fiction games and how the system dealt with input and processing. It is not considered to be under an open license."

This github repo has been up for some years now (this old blog post has some back story: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-sourc... ) -- AFAIK it's the source contents from an old hard drive image from back when Infocom was a company.

(I only checked hitchhikers and starcross, because github is giving a lot of error pages for these right now.)

I could see this being important here in two ways:

1. If the source code of Zork has not been made available to the public before, then now is the year of publication.

2. If Zork source code has previously been made available to the public, perhaps the version published here has had changes made, in which case now is the year of publication of this version of the source code.

I assume that when Microsoft opens source code they have a team of lawyers that have solid legal arguments for what the copyright year should be in each case.

Therefore, maybe it’s even possible legally that

3. Even if source code was previously made available, and even if no changes were made in any way since then to any of the included source code or other files, perhaps just the act of using a different license is in its own way part of how copyright applies. Publishing something under a specific license in $CURRENT_YEAR does not retroactively make the license apply before the time at which it was made available under that license and so perhaps an argument could be made that copyright year in a license includes taking that into consideration.

(the grue would obviously just a picture full of black, though some creepy eyes would be a nice touch)

It really depends on the creator. A slop is a side effect of the fact that the entry barrier has been much lowered. Previously you at least had to put some effort into learning the craft before showing that to the world.

[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/28812/time-and-magik-the-tril...

It's more a gimmick than anything particularly useful. Might even distract if the image embellishes from the original description leading players down the wrong path for solving a puzzle.