Recreating (porting?) Zork The Undiscovered Underground using ZILF

Authoring ZIL
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Steadily working my way through recreating Zork The Undiscovered Underground in ZIL using ZILF. I’ve been live-streaming it, along with a couple of other parallel projects, if anyone is interested in following along: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVrHYoqKjYQzm76zYSF5BjkKDiOCHo6pN

Adam :slight_smile: :+1:

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Very nice, Adam.

Thank you.

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Probably a dumb question, but is that legal?

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Not a dumb question at all :+1:

I strongly suspect no, but it’s literally just for fun with zero commercial elements to it.

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In general, anything using Infocom’s intellectual property is technically in violation of copyright, but nobody has tried to enforce that copyright in decades. And ZtUU is available for free, so it’s not like you’d be undercutting anyone’s profits.

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It’s a slightly different case from the original games, because ZTUU was created (commissioned) by Activision circa 1997. But, as you say, it was a free promo to begin with.

Speaking of which: the IFDB link for ZTUU goes to a dead site. I’m going to re-upload it to the IF Archive.

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As Xerox copies being made by a xerox machine or ‘xeroxed’, copyright must be defended to remain in force. Xerox and Aspirin are examples.

If a copyright hasn’t been defended in decades it is probably unenforceable. ??

(I’m not even a park bench lawyer but I have shopped at J. C. Penneys.)

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Important distinction: that’s trademark, not copyright. You can trademark just about anything if you file the right paperwork and pay the fees (e.g. Facebook has trademarked the color blue and the lowercase letter “f”), but it only applies to a very specific domain (those trademarks are only for social media sites), and it only lasts as long as you’re actively using it and preventing it from being genericized (which is what happened to xerox and aspirin).

All the Infocom trademarks lapsed ages ago, but the copyright is still around: copyright applies to any sort of creative work, whether you file the paperwork or not, and lasts for longer than any of us will be alive thanks to Disney owning several politicians.

(And then there are patents, which are another kettle of fish entirely. Intellectual property law is complicated!)

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I was going to mention the trademark vs copyright thing, but you beat me to it. Trademarks need defending, but copyright lives forever…practically.

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Almost all. “Zork” lapsed but “Return to Zork” is still live, for some reason.

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It’s also worth noting that what exactly is protected by copyright isn’t always clear-cut—it’s something that gets debated in court and decided by a judge, rather than the law being crystal-clear on where the lines get drawn. Some authors take a very expansive view of copyright, making rather silly arguments about owning broad concepts and parts of the human experience and sending cease-and-desist letters to individual authors who usually have to give in instead of fighting back. But the Organization for Transformative Works has the policy that noncommercial transformative fan works fall under fair use, and has lawyers to back them up—and so far, nobody has seriously challenged them on it. That’s why IFComp now uses that policy.

Of course, porting ZtUU is not really transformative by the OTW’s definition, so it wouldn’t be protected regardless.

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Thank you for the clarification.

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That’s interesting, so if Activision were actively in the game with this then trying to create an actual Zork game (like Zork 4, just as an example) would be problematic but a game like Action Castle using a very Zork-like look and font would be fine?

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If there’s money involved, ask your actual lawyer, not a bunch of forum pontificators. (That’s us. We are forum pontificators.)

If it’s a free fan game, well, we can point to lots of Zork fan games that didn’t cause any trouble.

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Don’t worry about that, it’s literally just me doing it for fun as something to live-stream and show ZIL tinkering! I wouldn’t even look to upload it to IFDB unless people felt that a ZIL port would be of interest or curiosity. :slight_smile:

Thanks everyone for the replies!

Adam :slight_smile:

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Now, what I would really like to port to ZIL is the legendary @zarf game Enchanter II … it must be found! :slight_smile:

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I don’t know if uploading the binary would be useful, but I hope you’ll at least upload the source code to the Archive for future reference! It’s great having more ZIL source available to reference.

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I would definitely enjoy the source code.

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