Inform 7 Edition
This project is a ground-up translation of Infocom's Zork I from its original ZIL source code into Inform 7, the modern natural-language interactive fiction system. The goal is a faithful recreation that preserves the full original game — every room, puzzle, and mechanic — while taking advantage of Inform 7's expressiveness to fix long-standing bugs, improve the parser, and add quality-of-life enhancements that weren't possible in the original Z-machine environment.
The translation works directly from the historic ZIL source released by Activision under the MIT License, cross-referencing every routine, object, and table against the Inform 7 output. Inspiration and encouragement came from Dean Menezes' earlier Inform 7 port of Dungeon (the mainframe ancestor of Zork), which demonstrated that a large-scale Infocom translation into Inform 7 was not only possible but could produce clean, readable source. In a parallel effort, David Cornelson is porting the original mainframe Dungeon — the sprawling PDP-10 game that was later split and refined into Zork I, II, and III for home computers — into Inform 7 as well. This project applies a similar philosophy to the commercial Zork I specifically, working from the released ZIL rather than the Fortran Dungeon source.
The full source code is open and readable — every line of game logic is visible in the source browser, and each versioned release includes a snapshot of the Inform 7 source alongside the playable game.
Play Current Version View Source Browse SourceBug fixes from the original ZIL source, quality-of-life improvements, and parser enhancements.
Complete ZIL-to-Inform 7 translation of Zork I.