Dive in and you’ll find that things are very different now than they were then. At the time Infocom was active, personal computers did not have a widely shared architecture, so the path ZIL’s architects took was to allow game creators to write instructions for a virtual machine called the Z-machine, which was then brought to the various platforms of the day. There are interpreters available today for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, among other platforms.

The interactive fiction community is still quite lively, and people are still making games using ZIL and the Z-machine today. But they’ve been joined by creators using new tools for spinning interactive, text-focused games like Twine and Ink, some of which are used as middleware in modern graphical game productions big and small.

Gamasutra, a site which covers news for the game development industry, also noted that Activision still owns the rights to Infocom games and could request a takedown if it wanted. For now, though, historians, narrative designers, programmers, and gaming enthusiasts alike can benefit from Scott’s effort.