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Infocom

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Infocom, founded on June 22, 1979, was the producer of numerous computer games, primarily interactive fiction (text adventures). The company was to last for a decade, of which it spent seven years as an independent operation.

Overview

Infocom was well-known in game-playing circles for the parsers used in its witty, ambitious text adventures, which allowed the user to type complex 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 company was also known for shipping creative props with its games.

The first (and very successful) game Zork was created in 1977, two years before the creators founded the company Infocom. The game was finally released in 1980. Other popular and inventive titles included the rest of the Zork series, 1984's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, based on the work of Douglas Adams, and 1985's A Mind Forever Voyaging.

In 1986, Infocom merged with Activision, another well-known company in the computer gaming industry, and was shut down in 1989.

Notable titles

Legacy

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 Apple Macintosh, and even Java.

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