DORK v2.0.0: The Great Under-Moderated Internet

A fully functional Zork parody in which the monsters are familiar, the internet is cursed, and the compiler is older than most opinions about software architecture.

DORK is a meme-infected fork of the open-source Zork I source. It turns the Great Underground Empire into the Great Under-Moderated Internet using actual ZIL and an actual Z-machine v3 story file. This is not a browser app wearing a green terminal filter. It is 1980s interactive-fiction technology doing useful work and making modern software look needlessly dramatic.

The previous dork1.z3 was only a renamed original Zork story file. The edited source also contained a malformed string and invalid comments, so it could not produce a real DORK build. v2.0.0 fixes the source, proves the build in CI, and generates a genuine playable DORK story.

Play

Download dork1.z3 and open it with any Z-machine interpreter that supports version 3 story files, such as Frotz.

Useful commands after the ordinary Zork commands have failed to improve your online presence:

SHITPOST
RATIO
MUTE
LURK
PROMPT
DEPLOY
SUBSCRIBE
GRASS

Highlights include:

• a brand intern paladin whose smile has quarterly targets;
• an NFT whose underlying rock has retained more value than the certificate;
• an endless terms-of-service scroll with no meaningful opt-out;
• a content moderator troll armed with a legacy banhammer;
• synthetic clout and platform-status ranks;
• the classic maze rebuilt from microservices, YAML, cookie banners, node_modules, AI wrappers, green dashboards, and fourteen kinds of lockfile;
• a payment system that cannot run because Z-machine v3 predates TLS by over a decade.

Build

DORK is tested with ZILF 1.9. Install ZILF, then run:

make
make verify

If ZILF is not on your PATH:

make ZILF=/path/to/zilf verify

The compiled story is written to build/dork1.z3. make verify checks that the artifact has a complete header and targets Z-machine version 3. GitHub Actions downloads the pinned Linux x64 ZILF archive, verifies its SHA-256 digest, compiles the story, checks the result, and publishes it as a workflow artifact.

What was broken

Two bugs prevented the modified source from compiling:

1. A dialogue line began with an escaped quote instead of a ZIL string. That swallowed later source until the compiler reported an apparently unrelated error around Commandment #12592.
2. New prose used C-style line-comment assumptions. In ZIL, those semicolon lines were parsed as code, culminating in the superb but unhelpful error GVAL: atom 'blocking' has no global value.

Both are fixed, and the game is compiled on every push and pull request so the dungeon cannot quietly become a README attached to an unrelated binary again.

Source and license

The original game was written by Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Bruce Daniels, and Tim Anderson and published by Infocom. Microsoft released the historical Zork I source under the MIT License in 2025. DORK's modifications are also distributed under the repository's MIT License.

This parody is provided for education, preservation, experimentation, and the important scientific question: how much internet nonsense can fit inside a Z-machine story file?