Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, and Planetfall
(Zork Nemesis is pretty unlike other Zork games.)
Getting nerds who grew up on Zork to effectively give free problem solving training data and pay a subscription price for the privilege by grounding RLHF data collection into a beloved franchise might not be that low on priorities over at Microsoft.
I’m down for that.
> Infocom games are text adventures where users direct the action by entering short strings of words to give commands when prompted
Sounds to me these games will soon be made irrelevant by upcoming LLM tech. Am I missing something?
On the contrary, this is exactly how they will sell LLM tech to the greybeads. Look at what Square enix tried to pull off this year with the Portpotia Serial Murder Case's "remake".
Interactive Ficion in the 2020's is the niche of niches, but they've been trying for decades to produce what ChatGPT is seemingly making possible. If/when MS pursues why not use one of the OG IP's to sell such an experiment?
Jason Scott then produced Get Lamp - I have a coin - which brought so much of that era together.
I view text adventures, be they Infocom, Level 9 or others, as an inspiration to others. A re-release could only be a good thing.
A yandex search will reveal various torrent links.
It should unzip to six folders;
Bonus Games
Infocom Games
Infocom InvisiClues
Infocom Universe Bootleg.nfo
IUB Database
Software Tools
I got my son to play the text adventures for some 30 minutes, but he lost interest and went to play Roblox... In another instance, I got him to type a full 100-200 command walkthrough while I read the commands, he enjoyed it but didn't want to do it again.
Give me a new Zork story, great font, great music, I'd be all over it.
Obviously you'd chose actions from a list due to the controller, but with progressive disclosure you wouldn't really feel like cheating the game.
If a company or different individual hires someone to create work for them, the work would transfer from the originator to the company or individual, thus putting it on the faster track automatically.
nice.
Game Pass for Handhelds, so you can get access to their archive of handheld optimized games.
Microsoft isn't about to let go of IP rights around the most well known text adventures.
But at the same time, I'd be surprised if they don't do anything with them either.
The synergy between their investment into OpenAI and their acquisition of Activision might suggest that they'll be doing quite a fair bit with those franchises indeed.
How OpenAI and text adventures could possibly fit together is beyond me, though.
"Want some rye, 'course ya do..."
I mean, come on, let's not clutch our pearls after that abomination.
Oddly, the text adventures were nowhere near as punishing.
They ought to be public domain by now.
In fact, games should have a shorter copyright term since they're harder to preserve and less valuable over time.
I still have a box legally-purchased of Zork games (CDROM editions) and manuals and a copy of Planetfall here, but should I feel any shame about pirating them? I don't think I should.
Counterargument to myself and trivia: All the authors of Zork are still living. (I assume they receive no royalties, though, based on how the game industry generally works).
Part of the issue is that the loudest voices are that 0.01% of authors whose work still has some commercial value decades after its creation.
> Part of the issue is that the loudest voices are that 0.01% of authors whose work still has some commercial value decades after its creation.
My favorite scheme is that all copyright last for 10 years by default. You can register it for $100 for another 10 years. And every 10 years after that, the cost goes up by 100x. That way commercial works that are very economically valuable can be protected for a pretty long time, but everything makes it into the public domain relatively quickly.
Maybe the numbers need to be tweaked a bit, but I think the idea is fundamentally sound.
This is not related, but another problem with current US copyright law is that there's no exception for companies that go out of business. The works are still copyright encumbered even if no one exists that can enforce that right.
Based on the former two points, you end up with works where you can't find out who holds the copyright, and it doesn't matter if they're dead or whatever because it's still copyrighted. This leads to the "assume everything is copyrighted" posture that stifles so much creativity.
I sell code (programming libraries, and commercial business systems) which have been under continual development sint 1996. So 27 years.
Copyright in this context would be complicated in a "20 year" model. Last month saw a significant upgrade to a product first released in 2000. Should the 2K version be public domain now?
I get the main complaint, especially in the context of old games like infocom (which are abandoned). It feels like those should move gracefully to public domain. But on the other hand there are those of us who do still make a living from old, but active, code.
I do agree that current copyright is absurdly long, but I also understand why Disney et al see ongoing value in their creations and are prepared to lobby for that value.
I don't think there's a simple fix here, one which covers such a wide set of circumstances. All the fixes I've seen proposed are "great for x, terrible for y".
… so maybe it would be useful to have a law that protects the preservation of old media, allowing the public to legally break DRM, copy distribute and shift it to new platforms after a number of years… without necessarily granting rights to economic exploitation of the characters, story, etc. or making new derivative works.
E.g. At x+10 anyone could make a new sequel to Zork, but the rights to the published Zork are retained for x+25
That feels fair.
People aren't writing books because of the profits they might make 25 years from now.
I could imagine an argument for harmonising the duration with patents for even more simplicity.
Another interesting consequence is a lot of GPL code would become public domain. I haven’t really thought about that before.
Sure, but who should capture that value for those works. Is it more fair that all the value goes to the publishers and TV/movie studios making adaptations, rather than some of it being shared with the author.
Piracy is preservation. The only reason works are preserved tomorrow, is because somebody is pirating them today.
You will run into legal problems if you try distributing those archives/backups, but simply making them for your own use is perfectly legal.
Obligatory IANAL.
Copyright is no longer about protecting the rights of the original creators... but purely about allowing big companies to purchase and exploit IP created by others.
If we think about this from a Microsoft perspective though: releasing games is a lot easier these days. They sell access to hundreds of games via Game Pass which is something they're marketing pretty hard and trying to make successful. Why not add all of the Infocom games to it? This would sell a couple Game Pass licenses (mainly for the somewhat neglected PC version of Game Pass, so that's nice), preserve the titles and expose them to a much broader audience.
I mean the hobbyist and game historian in me loves it all going CC but the realist and the guy who thinks about scale and impact says if MS would just get these old titles on Game Pass that'd be a pretty nice nod to the past and a win for them as well.
The fact that Zork doesn't enter the public domain until 2047 is a bigger issue where somehow, incomprehensibly, we've allowed Hollywood and Mickey Mouse to rob us of our cultural heritage from the 20th century at gunpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
Even today, creation and publication has become a lot easier and cheaper since Shakespeare's times already. But people still like his work, despite a flood of new material having come out since they were first published.
Of course, Shakespeare is exceptional in his cultural cachet.
> We should adapt new copyright policies to not only preserve these works, but to push people to keep innovating.
What do you have in mind? Archiving is already mostly allowed by current copyright policies. And I'm not sure how copyright policies can 'push people to keep innovating'? At most you can try to get out of the way.
Or, if you are being sneaky, you can lobby for arcane and arbitrary censorship rules: after all, limitations breed creativity. Eg East German political jokes were a lot better than West German ones.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
But for BOTD: tech workers tend to get paid well to deliver one specific project so the industry doesn't have as strong demand for royalties as art. Especially since tech isn't necessarily creating art itself but implementing other's creations. It's a bit different compared to an artist who makes a popular character and that character is being used decades later to sell plushies. Or a writer who's book is turned into a billion dollar franchise. The worst thing you can sell as an artist is your entire creative IP but that's unfortunately common in industries like animation or publishing.
Just like Mickey Mouse or movies from the 1960s? Or the Lord of the Rings books?
> In fact, games should have a shorter copyright term since they're harder to preserve and less valuable over time.
I don't understand how that's an argument for the length of the copyright either way? If I draw with water-colours on a fallen maple leaf, that is really hard to preserve and because of lack of artistic skill, was never valuable in the first place (mostly due to lack of artistic skill); but I don't thing that should have its own special copyright term length.
Rights to some artifacts being less valuable over time already factors into the severity of punishment when you get caught pirating (if memory serves right): aren't damages based on revenue supposedly lost from pirating?
> Counterargument to myself and trivia: All the authors of Zork are still living. (I assume they receive no royalties, though, based on how the game industry generally works).
That shouldn't make a difference: when they agreed on the deal to sell their rights (assuming they did so), the parties took into account how long the sold copyrights were likely to last.
> I still have a box legally-purchased of Zork games (CDROM editions) and manuals and a copy of Planetfall here, but should I feel any shame about pirating them? I don't think I should.
I don't much like most of current copyright law. Whether you want to feel any shame is up to you, it's a moral decision, not a legal one.
One argument might be that, compared to other media, video games' continued availability may be particularly dependent on whether or not they become public domain.
If video game hardware quickly becomes out of date and old games lose their economic value quickly, then the copyright holder may not be motivated to put in the effort to keep the game available.
However, an archivist motivated by artistic or historical rather than economic value may still be willing to put the effort into keeping the game available if it is in the public domain.
Yes? It's because of Disney that copyright laws are as ridiculous as they are.
