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Microsoft makes Zork I, II, and III open source under MIT License

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Zork, the classic text-based adventure game of incalculable influence, has been made available under the MIT License, along with the sequels Zork II and Zork III.

The move to take these Zork games open source comes as the result of the shared work of the Xbox and Activision teams along with Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). Parent company Microsoft owns the intellectual property for the franchise.

Only the code itself has been made open source. Ancillary items like commercial packaging and marketing assets and materials remain proprietary, as do related trademarks and brands.

“Rather than creating new repositories, we’re contributing directly to history. 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,” says the announcement co-written by Stacy Haffner (director of the OSPO at Microsoft) and Scott Hanselman (VP of Developer Community at the company).

Microsoft gained control of the Zork IP when it acquired Activision in 2022; Activision had come to own it when it acquired original publisher Infocom in the late ’80s. There was an attempt to sell Zork publishing rights directly to Microsoft even earlier in the ’80s, as founder Bill Gates was a big Zork fan, but it fell through, so it’s funny that it eventually ended up in the same place.

To be clear, this is not the first time the original Zork source code has been available to the general public. Scott uploaded it to GitHub in 2019, but the license situation was unresolved, and Activision or Microsoft could have issued a takedown request had they wished to.

Now that’s obviously not at risk of happening anymore.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 accounted for 19% of Comcast Internet traffic last week

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You might think that since Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (which was released last Friday) is the 21st game in the franchise, it wouldn’t be that highly anticipated. You’d be wrong. Last week’s entry set multiple records when it launched.

Specifically, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the game set new records for Game Pass subscribers, particularly for a first-day game launch. That’s, of course, to be expected—Call of Duty was a major reason why Microsoft acquired Activision, the longtime publisher of the series.

It gets a little zanier, though. The Internet service provider Comcast says Black Ops 6 was directly responsible for 19 percent of its overall traffic the week of the launch, according to a report in The Verge.

That’s partly due to the game’s popularity, but it can also be attributed to its huge file size. A full install of Black Ops 6 can take up to just over 100GB, depending on your platform—and possibly as much as 300GB if you also install game modes tied to the previous entries in the series, like the immensely popular battle royale Warzone. That will wreak havoc on users’ data caps; Comcast imposes a 1.2TB monthly cap in many states.

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Microsoft reports big profits amid massive AI investments

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Microsoft reported quarterly earnings that impressed investors and showed how resilient the company is even as it spends heavily on AI.

Some investors have been uneasy about the company’s aggressive spending on AI, while others have demanded it. During this quarter, Microsoft reported that it spent $20 billion on capital expenditures, nearly double what it had spent during the same quarter last year.

However, the company satisfied both groups of investors, as it revealed it has still been doing well in the short term amid those long-term investments. The fiscal quarter, which covered July through September, saw overall sales rise 16 percent year over year to $65.6 billion. Despite all that AI spending, profits were up 11 percent, too.

The growth was largely driven by Azure and cloud services, which saw a 33 percent increase in revenue. The company attributed 12 percent of that to AI-related products and services.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s gaming division continued to challenge long-standing assumptions that hardware is king, with Xbox content and services posting 61 percent increased year-over-year revenue despite a 29 percent drop in hardware sales.

Microsoft has famously been inching away from the classic strategy of keeping software and services exclusive to its hardware, launching first-party games like Sea of Thieves not just on PC but on the competing PlayStation 5 console from Sony. Compared to the Xbox, the PlayStation is dominant in sales and install base for this generation.

But don’t make the mistake of assuming that a 61 percent jump in content and services revenue is solely because Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service is taking off. The company attributed 53 points of that to the recent $69 billion Activision acquisition.

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