Play Zork I as a comic strip.
Reimagining two historical Microsoft open-source projects as a browser-native comic adventure. Zork I's original ZIL sources supply the world; Microsoft Comic Chat's layout engine draws it. It runs in your browser — nothing to install.
▶ START PLAYING Where this came from ↓
What it does
Every turn becomes panels — figures, poses, balloons — chosen by the same layout logic Comic Chat used, ported and cited.
All 110 rooms, 137 objects, the thief and the troll. Completable from West of House to the Stone Barrow.
Close the tab in the middle of the dungeon and come back to the same room. Three save slots and an autosave, kept in your browser — no account, no upload.
Never played a text adventure? /help explains how commands work and
/hint shows what's around you, without spoiling a puzzle.
Where this came from
Infocom, written in ZIL by Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Bruce Daniels and Tim Anderson. Microsoft released the source under the MIT licence (© 2025 Microsoft). Original source →
Microsoft's IRC client that rendered conversation as an automatically composed comic strip; shipped with Internet Explorer 3.0, discontinued in the early 2000s. Its source is likewise MIT (© Microsoft Corporation). Original source →
This is not a source port and does not recreate either historical runtime. The ZIL is understood, its semantics extracted into an intermediate representation, and the IR executed by a browser-native engine; the comic layer is a cited port of Comic Chat's layout logic. The engine's output matches the original game's reference interpreter on every one of 143 walkthroughs, byte for byte — see the about page for the detail.