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A wing  /  1976 to now

The Revived Wing

Most of what is in this museum is gone in its original form: cabinets scrapped, plugins retired, servers switched off. A few games survive because somebody wrote down how they worked and gave permission to keep them running. This wing is about those games, and about the small legal sentence that decides whether a game can be saved.

Read this first. This wing names real games and people, because preservation is about specific works and the credit belongs to their authors. Names of other people’s games appear as history only. Our revived games carry names of their own. How we work.

A cave, written down

In the mid-1970s Will Crowther was a programmer at a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts that helped build the early ARPANET, the network that grew into the internet. He was also a keen caver who mapped real caves: before he wrote any game, he and his then wife Patricia had surveyed and mapped passages in the Flint Ridge system in Kentucky, part of the vast network now known as the Mammoth Cave system. Around 1975 and 1976 he wrote a program on his company’s PDP-10 computer that let you explore a version of that cave by typing short commands. Crowther later said he wrote it partly for his daughters.

The program described a place in prose and waited for you to answer in two words: a verb and a noun, or a direction. You picked things up, carried a lamp, found treasures and got lost. There were no pictures at all. It was a game made of sentences, and it ran on the kind of machine that universities and research labs shared over the network.

In 1977 Don Woods, a graduate student at Stanford, found a copy on a computer there. He contacted Crowther, got his blessing, and expanded Crowther’s game a great deal, adding more of a fantasy flavour, more puzzles and a scoring system. That version, usually called Colossal Cave Adventure or simply Adventure, spread from machine to machine across the network, and players copied, ported and extended it for years. It gave its name to a whole genre: the adventure game.

A cave with a licence

For decades the many versions of the game lived in a legal fog. Everyone knew who had written it, and nobody had ever said exactly what others were allowed to do with it. In 2017 the programmer Eric S. Raymond, with the agreement of Crowther and Woods, published Open Adventure: a careful port of the last version the two authors had made together, a 430-point edition from 1995, to modern C, released under an open-source licence. The cave can now be built, studied and played on modern machines, legally, and its text is preserved exactly. A game first typed into a shared mainframe is now something anyone may keep.

You can explore the cave on our Revived shelf as Lantern Deep, built on Open Adventure and shipped with its licence and the authors' credit.

The underground empire

Among the players of the cave game in 1977 were members of the Dynamic Modelling Group at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT. Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling set out to make something bigger. Between 1977 and 1979 they wrote Zork on the lab’s PDP-10, in a programming language called MDL. Its world was a great underground realm, and its parser was the real leap: instead of two words, you could type whole sentences with adjectives, objects and prepositions, and the game usually understood.

In 1979 several of its authors and colleagues from MIT founded a company, Infocom, to sell games to the home computers that were starting to appear. The mainframe game was far too large for those machines, so it was split into three parts, released as a trilogy starting in 1980. To fit and to travel, the team designed a small virtual machine, the Z-machine. Each game was written once as a story file for that virtual machine, and only a small interpreter had to be written for each home computer. It was an elegant idea years ahead of its time, and it is the reason those games are so easy to preserve: modern interpreters still run the original story files.

Infocom became famous for text adventures with wit and depth, and for the printed extras packed in the box. It was bought by a larger publisher in 1986, and its Cambridge offices closed in 1989. The games lived on in compilations, and the source code passed, along with the company, through several owners. In 2019 a copy of the source code of many Infocom games was posted publicly online by the archivist Jason Scott, as history, but without any licence that let people use it.

The licence arrives

In November 2025 Microsoft, which had acquired the trilogy’s owner, released the source code of the three games under the MIT licence, one of the shortest and most permissive open-source licences there is. Almost half a century after it was written, a game from a university lab became something anyone may study, change and share, as long as they keep the copyright notice with it.

A playable revival of the trilogy, under a name of its own, is playable on our Revived shelf: Vael I, Vael II and Vael III. They are built from the released code, keep the original copyright and licence notice, and credit the authors.

Thirteen kilobytes

The open-source game did not stay on mainframes. On the web it found a natural home, because a browser game is already delivered as readable code. One of the friendliest places it lives is js13kGames, a competition started in 2012 by Andrzej Mazur. Each year, from the thirteenth of August to the thirteenth of September, entrants make a complete browser game whose zipped files must fit in thirteen kilobytes. That is less than a small photograph. Every sound has to be synthesised and every picture drawn by code, which is exactly the craft this museum keeps describing.

The limit produces astonishing work, and because entrants submit their source code along with their game, the competition has left a large public library of small, complete, well-understood games. Many of their authors chose an open licence for them, which means those games can be kept alive by people other than their authors.

With thanks

Several games on our Revived shelf began as entries to that competition or in the same open web scene. They were made by Jack Rugile, whose arena shooters and line-drawing defence games are known for their glowing, kinetic feel; by Ian Chiao, whose ink-brushed slingshot swordplay game was made for the 2020 competition; and by Dan Prince, whose grumpy necromancer game was made for the 2022 competition. They released their work under open licences, and we are grateful. The full credits, with licences and links to the original source, are below and on each game’s page.

Why licences matter

Here is a fact that surprises many people: published source code is not permission. In most countries a creative work is protected by copyright the moment it is made, and that includes code. If a game’s code is online with no licence, the default is that all rights are reserved. You may read it, but you may not legally copy it, change it or run a copy of it on your own site. The code can be visible and still be locked.

A licence is the sentence that unlocks it. The MIT and BSD licences say, in a paragraph, that anyone may use, copy, change and share the work, as long as the copyright notice and the licence travel with it. The Unlicense goes further and dedicates the work to the public domain. Licences such as the GPL allow all of that but ask that changed versions be shared under the same terms. All of them are clear, which is the point. Clarity is what lets a museum, a library or a stranger keep a game alive after its author has moved on.

The size of the problem

Games are disappearing. A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network estimated that around 87 percent of classic games released in the United States were no longer commercially available. Some survive in archives, some in the memories of their players, and some nowhere at all. Games that depended on a server stopped working when the server did. Games that depended on a plugin stopped when the plugin did, and the Flash Hall tells that story.

Archivists work around these losses with skill and patience. Volunteer projects collect and catalogue old web games, emulators let old machines run on new ones, and in the United States the Copyright Office has granted limited exemptions that let libraries and archives preserve certain games. But those exemptions are narrow, and an archive can only keep what the law lets it keep. A clear open licence, chosen by the author, removes the doubt in one stroke.

How we treat a revived game

Eracade hosts only its own work and games whose authors licensed them for reuse. When we revive one, we give it a new name of our own, so that nobody mistakes it for the original or for an official edition. We keep the author’s copyright notice and ship the original licence file with the game. We credit the author and link to the original source and the exact version we started from. Then we do the work to make it fit here: seeded runs so boards are fair, touch controls, sound that respects your volume, and reduced motion where we can. If you are an author and would like something changed, or removed, write to us and we will do it.

Further reading

Outside links are chosen for being stable, general and free to read. We link; we do not copy.

Play the history

Open-source games brought back to run here, each under its own licence and credited to its author.

See the whole Revived shelf, with licences and sources.

Stamp this wing

If you have read this far, take a stamp for your Passport. It is saved in this browser only, next to your game stamps, and nothing is sent anywhere.

Open your Passport

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