The de-facto builds

Every disc in this catalog copies rather than remasters: one set of story-file builds was fixed in place by the 1992 Lost Treasures CDs, inherited byte-for-byte by every later compilation, and adopted by the interactive-fiction community as each game’s version of record - the builds that interpreter authors test against, that reference materials describe, and that a player almost certainly has if they have the game at all. This page names that de-facto build for each of the 35 games and lists which cataloged collections carry it, verified by hash throughout. It answers where to get the blessed copy of a game; for what the original boxes actually shipped, which is a different and often surprising question, see box-releases.md. Per-collection detail: each collection’s versions.md holds the measurements, the platform variants, and the later masters that never shipped.

The status is descriptive, not editorial: these are not always the last builds Infocom made (the leaked repositories hold later masters for a third of the catalog), and not always one build per title (five games shipped platform splits that persist to this day, and the five Solid Gold editions appear as their own rows, since the community treats them as separate editions rather than replacements).

Columns: Box = original boxed retail media, checked where this build has been verified first hand from a physical diskette (marked ‡). A box that shipped a different build is not checked here - that is a question about releases rather than about where to play, and box-releases.md answers it per title; MP = Masterpieces (1996); LTOI1/LTOI2 = the 1992 Lost Treasures CDs; Leak = the historicalsource repositories (2019), where “hist” marks a build present only in a repository’s git history. A hybrid disc carries two platform trees and so can hold two builds of one game: Masterpieces checks both Planetfall rows (plain on its PC side, Solid Gold on its Mac side) and both Leather Goddesses rows, and LTOI1 checks both Hitchhiker’s rows - the (PC)/(Mac) marker on a build names the side that carries it. The Zork Anthology (1994) and the Zork Legacy Collection (1997) are not columns because they never carry a build these columns lack: the anthology discs redistribute the Zork-family set, and the Legacy Collection’s DATA.Z repeats Masterpieces’ shared story files.

* The CD copies of Zork Zero are complete as a game but lack the MCGA graphics file (ZORK0.MG1) - only the retail floppies (and the IF Archive’s separately hosted copy) carry it; see media assets.

† Masterpieces’ PC copy also carries the sound upgrade in the game’s DATA folder: LHSOUND.ZIP, with the fourteen samples and the patch that converts r203 into the r221 sound build; see media assets.

‡ The build has been read first hand from an original retail diskette and checked against its own Z-machine checksum. What each box shipped - including the eight builds that no compilation carries and no leaked repository holds - is cataloged per title in box-releases.md.

Reading the table:

• The de-facto set is the 1992 file set. Twenty-eight titles have a single standard build, and in every measured case it is byte-identical from its first CD appearance through 1997 - and for Zork Zero, back to the 1989 retail floppies themselves.
• Five platform splits persist inside the de-facto set (Arthur, Journey, Seastalker, Sherlock, Zork Zero): the PC build is the one that circulates in modern interpreters, the Mac build the one Mac-era players had. Where a split exists this table lists the PC build as the de-facto one, since that is what the compilations’ installers, and everything downstream of them, deliver.
• Solid Gold never supplanted the originals. The plain builds remained the standard; the discs used the Solid Golds only as one-platform substitutes (Hitchhiker’s PC side, Planetfall’s and Leather Goddesses’ Mac sides), and Zork I’s never shipped on any cataloged disc. A parallel edition line, not a succession.
• Wishbringer Solid Gold is the row with only a Box check: a real 1988 retail release that no collection cataloged here carries - no disc includes it, and the leak holds only its ZIL source. Its story has now been read first hand from the original MS-DOS diskette: v5 r23.880706, 164,712 bytes, exactly as Doherty documents it, with the Z-machine checksum verified, Doherty’s 5J interpreter alongside, and hint/hints in the dictionary (the Solid Gold built-in hints). The r32933 EZIP experiment in the wishbringer repository, serial-dated a month earlier, is not an early copy of it: only 4 of its 499 blocks appear in the shipped build. That is the point of the row: the compilations moved every other edition’s canonical copy from box to CD, and this is the one shipped edition they skipped, so the original box is where this catalog gets it.
• The original Apple II diskettes carry builds the CDs never did. Two rows above are marked ‡ for builds that no cataloged collection carries: Wishbringer r68.850501 and Beyond Zork r49.870917. Both are documented releases that every cataloged collection skipped, which is the same gap the Wishbringer Solid Gold row describes - the compilations fixed one build per title in 1992, and everything the 1980s boxes shipped alongside it fell out of circulation. Where the same game’s build does appear on a CD, the Apple II copies agree with it exactly: Zork I, Zork II and Zork III read from Apple II diskettes are byte-identical prefixes of their Lost Treasures builds.
• The Apple II packaging split predicts whether a whole story fits. Boxes labelled 48K/16-sector hold their entire story on one disk side, and the flip side carries a different game - the Zork Trilogy puts Zork I on side 1 and Zork II on side 2 of one diskette, each side separately labelled, with Zork III on a second. Boxes requiring 128K do not fit: Leather Goddesses Solid Gold, Border Zone and Beyond Zork each hold the first 100,864 bytes of their story on the 16-sector side (63%, 56% and 39% respectively) and the remainder on the reverse of the same diskette, written in a second format. That split is documented behavior, not an inference: per Michael Sternberg’s An Apple II Build Chain for Inform (KansasFest 2017), an XZIP title’s first disk is 16-sector with boot code and interpreter on tracks 0-3 and story from track 5, and “if the story file is larger than 100,864 bytes, the remainder of the Z-code is stored on a second 18-sector disk image” - 100,864 being exactly 394 sectors of 256 bytes, the figure measured off all three diskettes here. What the paper calls a second disk image shipped on these three as the flip side of one disc: all three have two index holes, the Solid Gold folio has no room for a second diskette, listings of the same Beyond Zork SKU show one disc, and the front sticker’s “16-sector disk” describes side 1 alone. The Zork Trilogy box settles that the two holes are deliberate rather than jacket stock, pairing a two-hole flippy with a one-hole Zork III disc in the same package. Those reverse sides now decode completely: floppy-imaging.md describes the format and the flux-level defects, and scripts/xzip18.py does the extraction. All three stories are recovered and verified. Leather Goddesses (231 of 231 second-surface sectors) and Border Zone (303 of 303) are byte-identical to the leak’s builds apart from three Apple II header bytes below the checksummed region. Beyond Zork r49.870917 - the one of the three carried by no CD and no leak, and so the reason this matters - assembles to 261,900 bytes matching its own declared checksum of 24D6, disassembling to 1,719 routines. It is the only known copy of that build.
• The 8-bit originals are where the first releases survive. Four of the ‡ rows are first releases of their titles - Wishbringer r68, Enchanter r10, Sorcerer r4, and Beyond Zork r49 near the start of its run - and every one of them is absent from the CDs and the leak alike. The compilations preserved one build per title and the earliest shipped versions simply fell out of circulation, so the 1983-85 boxes are where they survive in this catalog. The Atari pair are the earliest builds in this table: Sorcerer r4.840131 is the first Sorcerer that ever shipped, three prior builds having been alphas and betas that never left Infocom.
• De facto rarely means final. The leaked repositories hold later masters for eleven titles - Zork I r119 and Bureaucracy r160 most dramatically - none of which ever reached players. The community standard is wherever Activision’s 1992 masters happened to stop.