Yes. Last I checked (a couple of years ago), there was a live trademark on “Return to Zork” but not on “Zork” by itself.
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What caught me off guard on this, Microsoft had the rights to do this?
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Sure. MS bought Activision two years ago. Activision bought Infocom and all its rights in 1986. There’s details in between but that’s the important part.
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thank you for the information. I had indeed installed the zilf deb package from your website yesterday. The binaries were installed into /opt/zilf/bin/ and I had totally forgotten I had already installed zilf (maybe by hand) a long time ago, and its binaries were in /usr/local/bin/ which took precedence over the /opt location 
I’ve corrected that.
And now I can also tweak GSYNTAX.ZIL in zork so it’s possible to add “x” as an alias for “examine” (and also “bye” for exiting)
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People could do that before. The code was already available. What changed now is the license.
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Aside from institutions now having an easier time adding Zork to their libraries legally, I feel like Microsoft acknowledging they own Zork and it isn’t just in the dustbin of conglomerated IP that will be left to rot until it lands in the public domain is a bigger deal than anything this does to alter the gaming scene around these games as pretty much all individuals who even know about these games have been more or less ignoring the legalities and we already had unofficial source repositories anyone who cared could access, and if I’m not mistaken, Zork I has been fully rewritten in in inform and persumably the only reason there isn’t a well knownfan remaster to bring the trilogy up to modern parser standards is that no one has been interested in making it and this community having relatively little interest in hacks of older IF titles.
Take a breath, man. :)
MIT Zork has been rewritten in both Inform 6 and Inform 7. I don’t believe Zork 1/2/3 have been.
persumably the only reason there isn’t a well known fan remaster to bring the trilogy up to modern parser standards
Well, the parser they’ve got is pretty good. (Aside from the missing X abbreviation.) The scope for improvement is small.
If people want to improve Zork 1/2/3, I expect they’d work incrementally in ZILF rather than doing a complete rewrite.
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I’ve toyed with the idea, but the thought of putting that much effort into something whose possible outcomes included a cease-and-desist forbidding its distribution or, worse, a copyright infringement lawsuit, made it a non-starter. (However unlikely one may have considered those outcomes, they were still possible. And I’d rather not go out on a limb that’s supported only by corporate self-restraint from doing something stupid and pointless that they’d be wholly legally entitled to do.)
None of which is to say that the MIT-licensing makes my pursuing such a project likely!
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Zork’s parser is good. Usually when people talk about “modern parser standards” re:Zork, they actually mean “design,” as in the lamp batteries don’t run out or the thief can’t steal the ivory torch.
There hasn’t been a huge demand for these changes historically, which isn’t to say that nobody should pursue them if they are interested in doing so.
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Admittedly, I’m used to norms in mainstream game hacking/modding circles where skilled people have few/no qualms about disassembling or decompiling game code, reverse engineering game-specific data formats, and fixing bugs and adding quality of life features to games and publishers are pretty much universally panned whenever a project recieves a cease and desist.
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It seems like they chose to do that to save themselves some work and also to retroactively bless the version everyone was already using:
In collaboration with Jason Scott, the well-known digital archivist of Internet Archive fame, we have officially submitted upstream pull requests to the historical source repositories of Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III. Those pull requests add a clear MIT LICENSE and formally document the open-source grant.
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Sure. They’re just pointedly skipping past the question of “why not the other thirty-odd games?”
(Answer: because the lawyers haven’t cleared them yet, and as long as the lawyers are working on them, we can’t talk about them.) (Is my interpretation.)
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I registered the domain name zork.net on speculation around 1996 or 1997. It was a period where everyone was moaning that “good short domains” had all been taken, and so I tried to find a four- or five-letter word that spoke to my interests and history. I honestly assumed rs.internic.net would eventually come back to me with a “Haha, sorry, nice try.” (remember: in the mid-90s, the .net hierarchy still felt like it was for The People Who Run The Internet, rather than some punk university sophomore with a nostalgia kick!) but instead they took my money and it’s been my primary domain ever since.
I was contacted shortly after by the admin of zork.com (as it was around 1998 or thereabouts) who said that he had been contacted by Activision lawyers with some sort of demand letter. He sent them a photostat of a 1969 high school yearbook showing that “Zork” had been his nickname at the time, and they backed off.
We were in touch for a few years to just chat about generalities, but at some point he stopped renewing and I kept going.
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The session from MS Ignite where Zork was open sourced: Scott & Mark learn to connect the dots
The play-in-browser doesn’t seem to work, but a bit down on the side is a download link that works.
First mention of Zork at 19:00.
ZIL first spotted around 23:55
Zork open sourced at 28:15
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Sadly it looks like zork.com is just a domain squat now, not even in use.
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I mean, general avoidance of trademark conflict makes the front page of zork.net look somewhat similar. I only really provide deep links, since I used to have incredible google juice (thanks, mailman…)
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Unfortunately, that’s the most common fate of domain names in the modern era. The cost of squatting is basically nil and the potential profit is high.
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