Infocom

Infocom was the producer of numerous computer games (arguably some of the most fun!), primarily interactive fiction (text adventures). Infocom was well-known for the parsers used in its interactive fiction which allowed the user to type in complicated instructions to the game. Unlike some adventure games which could understand commands like "get apple", Infocom adventures could understand commands like "get the green apple on the table".

The first (and very successful) game "Zork" was created in 1977, 2 years before the creators founded the company "Infocom", let alone released the game (which finally occurred in 1980).

Other popular (and innovative) titles included the rest of the "Zork" series, 1984's "The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy", and 1985's "A Mind Forever Voyaging".

In 1986, Infocom merged with Activision, another great in the computer gaming industry.

Many Infocom titles remain available throughout the Internet community (legally in the case of the Zork trilogy, but illegally in most other cases). They are available as Z-machine story files, which require a Z-machine emulator (a Z-code interpreter) to play. These interpreters have been written for numerous platforms, ranging from older computers to palmtops to the IBM PC and Macintosh, and even Java.

A (currently incomplete) listing of Infocom's titles:

• Zork
• Suspended

An excellent site detailing a timeline of Infocom's founding, releases and eventual dissolution, can be found at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/timeline.html.

A very detailed examination of Infocom's creative successes and marketing failures is avaiable from http://mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/infocom/.