Curses was written by Graham Nelson between 1993 and 1995 in versions of Inform between 1 and 6, a simple C-like programming language for interactive fiction. That language was the ancestor of today's Inform 7, but it's a very different experience to read (or to write). For more on that early language, see: https://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/download_dm4.html The original source code has been lost. According to https://www.filfre.net/2019/11/new-tricks-for-an-old-z-machine-part-2-hacking-deeper-or-follies-of-graham-nelsons-youth/, in Graham's words: To my great regret, the source code for Curses is now lost. It was for a while on a disk promisingly labelled “Curses source code”, but that disk is unreadable, and not for want of trying. Somewhere in my many changes of address and computer, I lost the necessary tech, or damaged it. (And Jigsaw too, alas.) It wouldn’t be hard to resurrect something, by working from a disassembly of the story file: there’s actually a tool to turn story files into Inform 6 out there somewhere. I occasionally think of asking if anyone would like to do that, and perhaps produce a faithful Inform 7 implementation. This is a fairly faithful attempt to recreate Curses by decompiling the original byte code, and then recreating it in the latest version of Inform 6 (with the most recent Inform library). It is divided into each public release, from the original release 7, announced on rec.arts.int-fiction in the Spring of 1993, until the final, far larger release 16 in 1995.