Infocom

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Infocom
Slogan	This space intentionally left blank.
Type	Private (defunct)
Founded	MIT (1979)
Headquarters	Cambridge, Massachusetts
Key people	Dave Lebling Marc Blank Albert Vezza Joel Berez
Industry	Entertainment/Business software
Products	Zork series Planetfall series Leather Goddesses of Phobos series Z-machine Cornerstone See products listing.
Revenue	N/A
Employees	N/A
Website	None

Infocom was an American software company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced one notable business application, a relational database called Cornerstone. Infocom was founded on June 22, 1979 by MIT staff and students led by Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Albert Vezza, and Joel Berez and lasted as an independent company until 1986 when it was bought by Activision. Activision finally shut down the Infocom division in 1989, although they released some titles in the 1990s under the Infocom Zork brand.

Contents 1 Overview 2 History 2.1 The beginning 2.2 Standing out from the competition 2.3 Serious mistakes... 2.4 ...and the Activision takeover 2.5 The end 3 Titles and authors 3.1 Interactive Fiction 3.2 Other titles 3.3 Collections 4 Legacy 5 Footnotes 6 See also 7 External links 7.1 Newsgroups

[edit] Overview

Infocom was well-known among game-players for the parser used in its witty, ambitious text adventures, which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game. Unlike earlier works of interactive fiction, which only understood commands of the form 'verb noun' (e.g. "get apple"), Infocom's parser could understand commands like "get all apples except the green apple from the barrel." Infocom games were written using a programming language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language or Zork Interactive Language--it was referred to as both) that ran on a standardized virtual machine called the Z-machine. As the games were text based and used variants of the same Z-machine interpreter, Infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers of the day simultaneously—the Apple II family, Atari 800, IBM PC compatibles, Amstrad CPC/PCW (one disc worked on both machines), Commodore 64, Commodore 128^[1], Kaypro CP/M, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, the Mac, Atari ST, and the Commodore Amiga. The company was also known for shipping creative props, or "feelies" (and even "smellies"), with its games.

[edit] History

[edit] The beginning

Inspired by Colossal Cave, Marc Blank and Dave Lebling created what was to become the first Infocom game, Zork, in 1977 at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. Despite the development of a revolutionary virtual memory system that allowed games to be much larger than the average personal computer's normal capacity, the enormous mainframe-developed game had to be split into three roughly equal parts. Zork I was released originally for the TRS-80 in 1980 and eventually sold more than a million copies across several platforms. It is notable that although Microsoft released a cheap version of Adventure with its initial version of MS-DOS 1.0 for IBM PCs, Zork I was still a popular seller for the PC, thanks to the superior quality of its writing and packaging.

Lebling and Blank each authored several more games and additional game writers (or "implementors") were hired, notably including Steve Meretzky. Other popular and inventive titles included the rest of the Zork series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and A Mind Forever Voyaging.

In its first few years of operation, text adventures proved to be a huge revenue stream for the company. Whereas most computer games of the era would achieve initial success and then suffer a significant drop-off in sales, Infocom titles continued to sell for years and years. One key employee said of their situation, "It was phenomenal—we had a basement that just printed money."

[edit] Standing out from the competition

Three components proved key to Infocom's success: marketing strategy, rich storytelling and feelies. Whereas most game developers sold their games mainly in software stores, Infocom also distributed their games via bookstores. Since their games were text-based, patrons of bookstores were drawn to the Infocom games as they were already interested in reading.

Next, Infocom titles featured strong storytelling and rich descriptions, eschewing the day's primitive graphic capabilities, allowing users to use their own imaginations for the lavish and exotic locations the games described. Infocom's puzzles were unique in that they were usually tightly integrated into the storyline, and rarely did gamers feel like they were being made to jump through one arbitrary hoop after another, as was the case in many of the competitors' games. The puzzles were logical but also required close attention to the clues and hints given in the story, causing most gamers to keep copious notes as they went along.

Sometimes, though, Infocom threw in puzzles just for the humor of it—if the user never ran into these, they could still finish the game just fine. But discovering these early forms of Easter Eggs was a guilty pleasure of the games. For example, one infamous example was in the Enchanter game, which involved collecting magic spells to use in accomplishing the quest. One of these was a summoning spell, which the player needed to use to summon certain characters at different parts of the game. However, at some point the game mentions the "Implementers" who were responsible for creating the land of Zork. If the player tried to "summon Implementers", the game would suddenly produce a vision of Dave Lebling and Marc Blank working at their computers and being surprised at this "bug" in the game and working feverishly to fix it.

Third, the inclusion of "feelies"—imaginative props and extras tied to the game's theme—provided some copy protection against pirating. Some games were unsolvable without the extra content provided with the boxed game. And because of the cleverness and uniqueness of the feelies, users rarely felt like they were an intrusion or inconvenience, as was the case with most of the other copy-protection schemes of the time.

Although Infocom started out with Zork, and although the Zork world was the centerpiece of their product line throughout the Zork and Enchanter series, the company quickly branched out into a wide variety of story lines: fantasy, science-fiction, mystery, horror, historical adventure, children's stories, and others that defied categories. In an attempt to reach out to females, Infocom also produced "Plundered Hearts," which required the gamer to take the part of a heroine in a swashbuckling adventure on the high seas, and which required the heroine to use more feminine tactics to win the game, since hacking-and-slashing was not a very lady-like way to behave. And to compete with the Leisure Suit Larry style games that were also appearing, Infocom also came out with Leather Goddesses of Phobos in 1986, which featured both "tame" and "lewd" playing modes, and that was notable for introducing "scratch-and-sniff" game cards.

Many of the games' puzzles proved too difficult for some players. Since only a few computer users at the time had access to online communities such as CompuServe and the The Source (service), Infocom was regularly flooded with phone calls from customers pleading for hints to solving game puzzles. Due to this, Mike Dornbrook created the Zork User's Group (ZUG) to handle a typewritten "pay-per-hint" service. He also started Infocom's customer newsletter called The New Zork Times to discuss game hints and preview and showcase new products. (After the threat of a lawsuit by the New York Times, the newsletter's name was later changed to The Status Line, a reference to an informational feature provided the player in every Infocom game.)

The pay-per-hint service eventually led to the development of InvisiClues: books with hints, maps, clues and solutions for puzzles in the games. The answers to the puzzles were printed in invisible ink that only became visible with a special marker that was provided with each book. Usually, two or more answers were given for each question that a gamer might have -- the first would provide a subtle hint, the second a less subtle hint, and so forth until the last one gave an explicit answer. Gamers could thus reveal only the hints that they absolutely needed to have to play the game. After playing the game, a typical player would then uncover the rest of the hints because they frequently were pretty funny.

For example, the original hint book for "Enchanter" had the following questions:

Question: Is Enchanter really Zork IV? Answers: Is the sky green? Does a bear build laser weapons in the woods? No.

Question: Will there be a sequel to Enchanter? Answers: Certainly. Zork V. (which turned out to be "Sorcerer")

Because of the clever use of hidden clues and Infocom's trademarked humor, the sale of InvisiClues proved incredibly lucrative -- even players who didn't need the hints would buy the books for post-game enjoyment. The books' sales consistently filled computer book best seller lists until the list developers were forced to combine all InvisiClues sales into one number, which simply assured that it would almost always occupy the topmost position.

Infocom also released a small number of "interactive fiction paperbacks," which were based on the games and featured the ability to choose a different path through the story. Every couple of pages the book would give you the chance to make a choice, such as which direction you wanted to go or how you wanted to respond to another character. You would then choose one of the given answers and turn to the appropriate page. These books, however, never did sell particularly well, and quickly disappeared from the bookshelves.

[edit] Serious mistakes...

In 1984 Infocom started putting resources into a new division to produce business products. In 1985 they released a database product, Cornerstone, aimed at capturing the then booming database market for small business. Though this application was hailed upon its release for ease of use, it sold only 10,000 copies; not enough to cover the development expenses. The program failed because, although it was packaged in a slick hard plastic carrying case and was a very good database for personal and home use, it was originally priced at $495 per copy and used copy-protected disks. Another serious miscalculation was that the program did not include any kind of scripting language, so it was not promoted by any of the database consultants that small businesses typically hired to create and maintain their DB applications. Reviewers were also consistently disappointed that Infocom -- noted for the natural language syntax of their games -- did not include a natural language query ability, which was the most expected feature for this database. And a final disappointment was that Cornerstone was available only for IBM PCs and not any of the other platforms that Infocom supported for their games; while Cornerstone had been programmed with its own virtual machine for maximum portability, that feature had become essentially irrelevant.

Whereas Infocom's games had benefited significantly from the portability offered by running on top of a virtual machine, this strategy did not prove to be a significant advantage for Cornerstone; in fact, the virtual machine significantly slowed the database's execution speed. Most businesses were moving to the IBM PC platform by that time, so portability was no longer a significant differentiator. Infocom had sunk much of the money from games sales into Cornerstone; this, in addition to a slump in computer game sales, left the company in a very precarious financial position. By the time Infocom removed the copy-protection and reduced the price to less than $100, it was too late, and the market had moved on to other database solutions.

And finally, the game market itself was shifting into graphic games. The 1990s, though, were a turbulent time for graphics development, as the computer industry was collapsing, with long-time computer makers such as Tandy/Radio Shack, Atari, and Commodore/Amiga disappearing, and the PC and Macintosh markets were fighting for dominance. Development of graphics technology was very aggressive during this time, which made it very expensive and risky to create cutting-edge, high-performance graphics, and many companies came and went in this period. Many people were buying new, more powerful computers expressly for games, and the days were long-gone when people would be satisfied with simple vectored line drawings, such as those that made the Wizardry games famous, or with the blocky graphics that were used in Sierra Entertainment's Kings Quest games. Gamers in particular were most unforgiving when the graphics did not live up to their expectations. In this climate, Infocom's history of text-based adventures and story-centered gaming did not help much in making the transition to graphics.

[edit] ...and the Activision takeover

A surprising lack of offers for such a successful company led to a reverse triangular merger with Activision on 13 June 1986. This turned out to be the beginning of the end for Infocom. While relations were cordial between the two companies at first, the departure of James Levy from Activision left Bruce Davis in charge. Davis believed that his company had paid too much for Infocom and initiated a lawsuit against them to recoup some of the cost. Furthermore, he made a string of poor, heavy-handed decisions that made Infocom unprofitable. For example:

• Davis demanded they use Activision's packaging plant instead of their own in-house one, raising the cost of each package from $0.45 each to over $0.90 each. In addition, the Activision plant made numerous mistakes in packaging where the Infocom one almost never did.
• Infocom had a successful marketing approach that kept all their games in store inventories for years. Because of this, older titles' sales often kept pace with sales of newer games. For example, because Zork was available for years after its initial release in 1980, it continued to top charts in sales well into the mid-1980s. Activision preferred to market Infocom's games the way they marketed their other titles: replacing older titles with newer ones. While this made sense for the graphically intensive games that made up the rest of Activision's catalog, since Infocom games were text based, it didn't make sense - the newer games didn't have improved text. This marketing approach cut off potential revenue for numerous Infocom titles that had consistently brought in money for several years.
• Davis demanded the struggling developer must produce eight titles a year. Infocom had traditionally produced about four games per year with more staff than they currently had.
• Davis pushed Infocom to release more graphical games, but the one they did release bombed. This was, in part, due to Infocom's long-standing rule of maximum portability; a game that could display graphics on a number of different systems couldn't take advantage of the strengths of any of them.
• The cost of acquisition was amortized by deducting it from Infocom's operating revenue during the next several years. Of course this accounting made it difficult for Infocom to show a profit.

[edit] The end

Rising costs and falling profits due to these changes and other botched ventures caused Activision to finally pull the plug on Infocom in 1989. For a few years, Activision continued to market Infocom's classic games in collections (usually by genre, such as the Science Fiction collection); in 1991, they published The Lost Treasures of Infocom, followed in 1992 by The Lost Treasures of Infocom II. These two compilations featured nearly every game produced by Infocom before 1988. (Leather Goddesses of Phobos was not included in either bundle, but could be ordered via a coupon included with Lost Treasures II.) In 1996, these were followed by Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom, a single CD-ROM which contained the works of both collections combined.

[edit] Titles and authors

[edit] Interactive Fiction

• The Zork series:
  • The original Zork Trilogy (Marc Blank & Dave Lebling):
    • Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (1980)
    • Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz (1981)
    • Zork III: The Dungeon Master (1982)
  • The Enchanter Trilogy:
    • Enchanter (1983, Marc Blank)
    • Sorcerer (1984, Steve Meretzky)
    • Spellbreaker (1985, Dave Lebling)
  • Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor (1987, Brian Moriarty)
  • Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz (1988, Steve Meretzky)
  • Zork: The Undiscovered Underground (1997, Michael Berlyn and Marc Blank)
• Deadline (1982, Marc Blank)
• Starcross (1982, Dave Lebling)
• Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare (1983, Michael Berlyn)
• Infidel (1983, Michael Berlyn)
• Planetfall (1983, Steve Meretzky)
• The Witness (1983, Stu Galley)
• Cutthroats (1984, Michael Berlyn & Jerry Wolper)
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984, Steve Meretzky & Douglas Adams)
• Seastalker (1984, Stu Galley & Jim Lawrence)
• Suspect (1984, Dave Lebling)
• A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985, Steve Meretzky)
• Wishbringer: The Magick Stone of Dreams (1985, Brian Moriarty)
• Ballyhoo (1986, Jeff O'Neill)
• Hollywood Hijinx (1986, "Hollywood" Dave Anderson)
• Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986, Steve Meretzky)
• Moonmist (1986, Stu Galley)
• Trinity (1986, Brian Moriarty)
• Border Zone (1987, Marc Blank)
• Bureaucracy (1987, Infocom & Douglas Adams)
• The Lurking Horror (1987, Dave Lebling)
• Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It (1987, Jeff O'Neill)
• Plundered Hearts (1987, Amy Briggs)
• Stationfall (1987, Steve Meretzky)
• Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels (1988, Bob Bates)
• Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur (1989, Bob Bates)
• James Clavell's Shogun (1989, Dave Lebling)
• Journey (1989, Marc Blank)

[edit] Other titles

• Graphic Adventures
  • Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X! (1992, Steve Meretzky)
  • Return to Zork (1993)
  • Zork: Nemesis (1996)
  • Zork Grand Inquisitor (1997)
• BattleTech Games
  • BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception (1988, developed by Westwood Studios)
  • BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Revenge (1991, developed by Westwood Studios)
• Other Games
  • Fooblitzky (1985, Marc Blank, Mike Berlyn, Poh Lim & Paula Maxwell)
  • Quarterstaff: The Tomb of Setmoth (1988, Scott Schmitz, Ken Updike & Amy Briggs)
  • Mines of Titan (1988, Louis Castle & Brett Sperry)
  • Tombs & Treasure (1989, developed by Nihon Falcom)
  • Circuit's Edge (1989, developed by Westwood Studios)
• Infocomics
  • Lane Mastodon vs. the Blubbermen (1988, Steve Meretzky)
  • Gamma Force in Pit of a Thousand Screams (1988, Amy Briggs)
  • ZorkQuest: Assault on Egreth Castle (1988, Elizabeth Langosy)
  • ZorkQuest II: The Crystal of Doom (1988, Elizabeth Langosy)

[edit] Collections

• The Zork Trilogy (1986; contained Zork I, Zork II & Zork III)
• The Enchanter Trilogy (1986; contained Enchanter, Sorcerer & Spellbreaker)
• The Lost Treasures of Infocom (1991; contained 20 of Infocom's interactive fiction games)
• The Lost Treasures of Infocom II (1992; contained 11 interactive fiction games)
• The Zork Anthology (1994; contained Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork & Zork Zero)
• The Masterpieces of Infocom (1996; contained 33 Infocom games plus six winners of the SPAG Interactive Fiction Contest not affiliated with Infocom)
• Zork Special Edition (1997; contained Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, Return to Zork, Zork: Nemesis, and Planetfall)
• Zork Classics: Interactive Fiction (2000)

[edit] Legacy

With the exception of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Shogun, the copyrights to the Infocom games are believed to be still held by Activision. Many Infocom titles can be downloaded via the Internet, legally in the case of the Zork trilogy and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but in violation of the copyright in most other cases. They are available as Z-machine story files and require a Z-machine interpreter to play. Interpreters are available for most computer platforms, the most widely used being the Frotz, Zip and Nitfol interpreters.

[edit] Footnotes

1. ^ Infocom was actually one of the very few companies (if not the only one) to release game software for the C128's native mode, contrary to most software houses' practice of only catering for the combined C64/128 market (as the C128 was compatible with the C64)

[edit] See also

• 69,105, a number commonly found as an in-joke in many Infocom titles.

[edit] External links

• MobyGames' entry on Infocom
• Infocom Documentation Project
• 1988 Interview with Joel Berez and Marc Blank
• Infocom-IF.org, Infocom history, authors, etc; often updated with any news from Activision
• Infocom Fact-sheet
• INFOCOM Homepage by Peter Scheyen—An enthusiast's home page, containing, among many other resources, a timeline of Infocom's founding, releases and eventual dissolution.
• Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.—A report from MIT which offers a very detailed examination of Infocom's creative successes and marketing failures. A must-read for Infocom fans.
• The Infocom Gallery with photos of all game boxes, feelies, instruction manuals and extra game contents
• A gallery of Infocom box art
• GUE-Network, contains an extensive image gallery of packaging, maps, and screenshots from the games
• Online java version of various Infocom games
• Bob's Interactive Fiction page
• Article at The Dot Eaters, featuring an extensive history of Infocom and its games

[edit] Newsgroups

• rec.arts.int-fiction with discussion of IF design
• rec.games.int-fiction with discussion of IF reading/playing