If so where could I find them I figure for my first game I could recreate one of them in a modenize game engine .
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You seem to be asking for a list of all interactive fiction ever — since you ask for all public domain games, and text adventures, and game books. You are talking about (in all probability) tens of thousands of things. Did you mean game books only?
If you did mean game books, I think almost none of them would be public domain. The first CYOA book was published in 1976 (only 50 years ago), so they are probably all still in copyright, and many of them are still in print.
I do know that the earliest ever gamebook Consider the Consequences! entered the public domain in 2025, so there’s that one.
If you meant all IF, not just gamebooks, then there’s more of them in the public domain, but most of them have been either remade to death, are much-beloved in their original form, or are the works of authors who are still around.
Cloak of Darkness and Cragne Manor Craverly Heights are common to replicate in different programming languages.
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@Hituro I was initially asking that 
like was there a list of public domain works . I know their is one for movies and books .
what is the status on zork and lone Wolf I see both have been remade several times.
I think I might just go with a public domain novel there are several of them from 19th century Frankenstein ,Dracula, and even several of the early 20th century classics are public domain now .
Both are not in the public domain, but available for noncommercial distribution.
If you’re looking to adapt a static novel into interactive fiction, it’s often difficult. The “true path” is easy enough, but then you have to come up with all the other branches, and often the original source is only a small part of the game itself.
@Hidnook to make it easier on myself there wouldn’t be a lot of branching the game will be linear and I figure it be episodic and short. The player would control the why and how and reaction but wouldn’t be able to prevent deaths or any major events .
It be closer to a tell tale game but I do want some form of game mechanics.
Craverly Heights, rather, a confusingly-similarly-named but completely unrelated game also by Ryan Veeder. I would never want to try porting Cragne Manor!
The original Colossal Cave Adventure has always been handwavingly treated as public domain, and nobody’s gotten in trouble for it, even when Microsoft released their own version for profit.
And now Zork I-III are released under the MIT license, which isn’t public domain but is very permissive.
Notably, though, all of these are parser games. I’ve previously proposed Mini-Cluedo as a similar small demo for choice-based systems (about on par with Cloak of Darkness for complexity; spec here), and there are versions in Dialog, Strand, Gruescript, Harlowe, Sugarcube, and Dendry for comparison.
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Oh the mini cluedo sounds interesting to adapt to a choice based system 
. Dies it already have example games @Draconis that I could play. I guess parser versions if so where .
Because that what I wanted to do take a parser game and adapt it to a choice mechanics . I was thinking zork or lone wolf but since they aren’t open source nvm .
Curious when it comes to zork or the larger text adventures if I did it as a hobby project would that still be consider violation because either way this project was going to be released as a free project. I just wanted to get some practice under my belt making a project and playing with twine .
Zork is open source; the MIT license lets you do pretty much whatever you want, except claim that it’s all your original work (you have to give credit to the original creators for the parts they wrote) and sue the creators if it breaks. It’s just also written in ZIL, a famously opaque programming language. But, plenty of people still use ZIL, and you can get support here on the forum if you get stuck!
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I’m not sure when copyright went from something you had to register to something automatic, but considering the life of the author + 70 years or 95 years from first publication depending on the situation duration of copyright, the safe assumption would be that nothing in the realm of computer software is old enough to be public domain and the only software in the public domain are those the author/publisher/rights holder has explicitly released into the public domain.
That said, IF is a niche that almost no one in the corporate space cares about and most of the companies from the genre’s commercial hay day have either gone under, been bought up, or have likely undergone so much overturn that no one there today remembers when the company made text adventures, and it’s probably not even clear who, if anyone, currently holds the rights to a lot of the older stuff… Heck, prior to the recent official open sourcing of the Zork Trilogy, I would have assumed Microsoft wouldn’t even register that they gained ownership of Zork in their acquisition of Activision and I was surprised that they actually did anything with that fact.
So, in all likelihood, there’s a lot of stuff in the gray area of, “Still under copyright, but there’s either no one to actually sue you for infringement or whoever could sue you couldn’t care less”, so its essentially an anti-lottery, very low chance of anything happening, but a very bad outcome in the unlikely even something happens.
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Derivative works of Emily Short’s Bronze are permitted. @Marnix, the creator of the development system that was the topic of that thread, took advantage of this to make an XVAN port of Bronze.
- Archive of Bronze’s web page, including source code
- @Shin 's port of Bronze to I7 9.3/6M62 would be more convenient if you wanted to be able to compile it on a modern system
While looking up links for this, I found Emily Short answering this very question on her blog in 2018: IF Candidates for porting.
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Wow, that is almost 10 years ago! I remember porting Bronze was way more work than I anticipated. Mainly because it has a customized sounds and light system.
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