Zarf
blog.zarfhome.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2017
Andrew Plotkin (Zarf) writes about interactive fiction, Infocom's Zork, and the code and history of its interpreters.
What HN saysHN links it for deep dives into Zork and Infocom source code, including the Visible Zorker and the write-up on Infocom interpreters.
26HN people shared it
10linked it in comments
36stories submitted
775story points
4 months agolast shared
2017people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The Visible Zorker4 people · 10 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 2All that Infocom interpreter code4 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 3What is ZIL anyway?3 people · 204 points · first shared 2019 · 72 comments on HN
- 4The Myth of Google’s Plus3 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Your load is too heavy: Zork deep reading2 people · 231 points · first shared 2017 · 32 comments on HN
- 6Microsoft buys Activision – what happens to Infocom's text adventures now?2 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 7Zarf Updates: A treasury of Zork maps2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 8All of infocoms game source code2 people · first shared 2019
- 9Tabbed out on the Oregon Trail1 people · 114 points · first shared 2024 · 22 comments on HN
- 10These violent delights1 people · 81 points · first shared 2022 · 15 comments on HN
- 11The Tic-Tac-Toe Mysteries of Xerloc O'Xolmes1 people · 44 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 12I am a person who will look at the Steam Machine and cry1 people · 29 points · first shared 2026 · 40 comments on HN
- 13The Age of Bronze and Steel1 people · 21 points · first shared 2025 · 2 comments on HN
- 14Zork is now open source1 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · 2 comments on HN
- 15Myst Online Material Released as CC BY-NA-SA1 people · 3 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
homarp · 2017-09-03
In http://blog.zarfhome.com/2017/08/your-load-is-too-heavy-zork-deep-read… , Andrew Plotkin was pointing to an Inform 6 version of Zork by Allen Garvin ,
http://plover.net/~agarvin/zork1.txt derived from the original decompiled Z-machine code.
pm215 · 2025-11-20
The others don't seem to have the MIT license pullreq added, so they are not open source; the source code is merely available. The repos have a note:
"This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, allowing researchers and students to study how code was made for these interactive fiction games and how the system dealt with input and processing. It is not considered to be under an open license."
This github repo has been up for some years now (this old blog post has some back story: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-source-code ) -- AFAIK it's the source contents from an old hard drive image from back when Infocom was a company.
(I only checked hitchhikers and starcross, because github is giving a lot of error pages for these right now.)
_emacsomancer_ · 2025-01-20
Re: the Visual Zorker visualisation, see Andrew Plotkin's associated blog post: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/01/the-visible-zorker
[ commentless HN discs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42769679 ]
jeffmill · 2025-01-14
Implementation details here: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/01/the-visible-zorker
ThePowerOfFuet · 2023-12-06
Go straight to the source:
https://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/11/infocom-interpreters
ksherlock · 2023-11-21
more backstory - https://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/11/infocom-interpreters
memalign · 2023-06-30
Discovered this via Andrew Plotkin’s rebuilt blog: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/06/welcome-to-the-new-blog
keyneus · 2023-02-11
If you're at all interested in digging through the Zork code yourself, you no longer need to know Z-machine assembly: the source code for most Infocom games was released/leaked a few years back, and is available here: https://github.com/historicalsource/
It's written in ZIL, which has a somewhat Lispy feel (for a bit of background, see another post by Plotkin here: http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/what-is-zil-anyway.html). Infocom's own internal documentation for ZIL is here: https://archive.org/details/Learning_ZIL_Steven_Eric_Meretzky_1995.
sehugg · 2019-09-11
This reminds me of when the Infocom folks moved from the functional MDL to the micro-friendly ZIL, while keeping much of the syntax of the former: http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/what-is-zil-anyway.html
chkuendig · 2019-04-16
It does, at least Zork runs, see http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-source-code.html and https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/38990