Infocom Wiki

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Infocom was a software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that produced numerous works of interactive fiction.

## History

Infocom was founded on June 22, 1979, by staff and students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and lasted as an independent company until 1986, when it was bought by Activision. Activision shut down the Infocom division in 1989, although they released some titles in the 1990s under the Infocom Zork brand. Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark in 2002.

### 1977 - 1979

Inspired by the first wide-spread text adventure, *Colossal Cave Adventure* by Will Crowther and Dan Woods, MIT students Marc Blank and Dave Lebling decided to create their own text adventure. Their tools were a DEC PDP-10 mainframe computer and a programming language called MDL which had been developed at the MIT by, among others, Bruce Daniels, Stu Galley and Chris Reeve. The game was hugely popular among students and was continuously improved by its creators until 1979, with Tim Anderson and Bruce Daniels providing so much work that they are credited as co-creators nowadays. Mid-1979 three of the four creators had finished university. The group founded Infocom on June 22, 1979 together with some friends from MIT. The founding members were Tim Anderson, Joel Berez, Marc Blank, Mike Broos, Scott Cutler, Stu Galley, Dave Lebling, J. C. R. Licklider, Chris Reeve, and Al Vezza, with the latter taking a senior role due to having been the assistant director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. Infocom was founded without having a specific business model in mind, but after some brainstorming the commercial marketing of *Zork* was determined to be the best solution. Given the fragmentation of the home computer market in those days, Berez and Blank came up with the idea to create a virtual machine that runs platform-independent code. For the code they developed a programming language called Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), and the virtual machine (called Z-machine) was subsequently ported to various home computers. Due to the limited memory of the then available hardware Lebling splitted the *Zork* into three parts. By the end of 1979 *Zork I* was running in the Z-machine and was ready to be ported and distributed.

### 1980 - 1985

The Infocom guys took the game to Personal Software (who later renamed to VisiCorp) who published the TRS-80 and Apple II versions of *Zork I*, with Infocom publishing the PDP-10 version themselves. In June 1981 *Zork II* was licenced by Personal Software, but in October 1981 Infocom got the distribution rights back because Personal Software focused on their *VisiCalc* software. With the huge success of the *Zork* games came the need to produce more games. Blank and Lebling came up with a mystery (*Deadline*) and a sci-fi game (*Starcross*) that were both published in 1982 along with *Zork III*, but a need for more authors was obvious. Steve Meretzky and Michael Berlyn joined the company, and by the end of 1983 the company had ten games on the market, all of them listed in the *Softsel top 40 list of best-selling computer games*.

Already in 1982 Infocom started to invest into the development of business software. Starting with two employees, Brian Berkowitz and Richard Ilson, the company began to work on *Cornerstone*, a database software that was supposed to attack market leaders like *dBase* or *VisiCalc*. With Al Vezza taking over the CEO position the business software department was favoured over the games division, and staffed well. When *Cornerstone* was released in 1985 it received favourable reviews regarding its usability, but it was heavily criticized for its slow performance and sold badly. The company had taken up loans to finance the *Cornerstone* development and now ran into financial trouble.

### 1986 - 1989

Infocom laid off half of their 100 employees, but the financial situation did not improve significantly. In June 1986 Activision bought up the company for 7.5 million USD. The acquisition was driven by Activision CEO Jim Levy who was said to be a fan of the Infocom games. End of December 1986 the Activision board replaced Levy with Bruce Davis. Davis had objected the Infocom acquisition right from the beginning. Under Davis' rule administrative steps were taken to align Infocom's way of working with that of Activision, leading to a raise of production costs and a degradation in product quality and marketing. Furthermore, significant sums of revenue money were transferred to Activision in order to make up for the acquisition costs.

By 1986 the graphical capabilities of computers had reached a level that made text-only games look outdated. Infocom had never invested in graphics, and Activision didn't invest in Infocom, so sales declined, and the company was over the hill. Staff was laid off, and *Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur* by Bob Bates (who wasn't even an Infocom emplyee, but a freelancer) was the last classic Infocom adventuire. In May 1989 Activision applied the axe and closed down development in Cambridge, offering employees new jobs in their California headquarter, transforming Infocom from a devolping company into a publishing label. Only five accepted the offer.

## Aftermath

Activision made use of the Infocom and Zork brands to produce a few more games related to the lore of Infocom. In the 1990s Activision produced the *Zork* games *Return to Zork*, *Zork Nemesis* and *Zork: Der Großinquisitor* along with a lot of compilations, but none of these had anything nothing to do with the old company Infocom.

## Games

* 1980: *Zork I: The Great Underground Empire*
* 1981: *Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz*
* 1982: *Zork III: The Dungeon Master*
* 1982: *Deadline*
* 1982: *Starcross*
* 1983: *Suspended*
* 1983: *The Witness*
* 1983: *Planetfall*
* 1983: *Enchanter*
* 1983: *Infidel*
* 1984: *Sorcerer*
* 1984: *Seastalker*
* 1984: *Cutthroats*
* 1984: *Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*
* 1984: *Suspect*
* 1985: *Wishbringer*
* 1985: *A Mind Forever Voyaging*
* 1985: *Spellbreaker*
* 1986: *Ballyhoo*
* 1986: *Trinity*
* 1986: *Leather Goddesses of Phobos*
* 1986: *Moonmist*
* 1987: *Hollywood Hijinx*
* 1987: *Bureaucracy*
* 1987: *Stationfall*
* 1987: *Lurking Horror*

## Other products

* 1985: *Cornerstone*, a database program
* 1986: *Fooblitzky*, a computer-assisted board game

## See also:

* List of Zork games
* List of adventure games
* List of mystery games
* List of science fiction games