Introduction
The Witness was originally written by Stu Galley. It is copyright 1983 (etc) by Infocom, then Activision, then renamed to Mediagenic, then Bobby Kotick bought it and renamed it Activision, then Vivendi bought it and merged it with Blizzard, then Microsoft consumed the lot.
Thus, the Witness source code is copyright 2025 by Microsoft. Microsoft has not released this game as open source, but I’m going at it regardless.
The Visible Zorker Project was created by Andrew Plotkin. MIT license; Github repo. Hosted by the Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog.
Editor's note: The archived Witness source does not exactly match the r23 game file (even though they were found together). The source code contains a few changes which were never compiled.
(We should also note that Witness r23 was not a release version! It was a "final development" version and may contain undetected bugs.)
I have attempted to reconstruct the source code as of the latest r23
compile by reverting all source changes that don't match the game file.
See ***VZ:*** comments in these files. For clarity, I will refer to
the archived source as "r23+".
Source files
- clock.zil (71 lines)
- events.zil (1971 lines)
- macros.zil (133 lines)
- main.zil (283 lines)
- parser.zil (1318 lines)
- people.zil (1770 lines)
- places.zil (3081 lines)
- syntax.zil (639 lines)
- things.zil (1147 lines)
- verbs.zil (2247 lines)
- witness.zil (70 lines)