History Of Infocom aka The Creators Of Zork

halcyon7 writes: "My MIT research group has spent the last two months studying Infocom ^[?] , Inc. (the creators of Zork ^[?] ) in great detail. We have talked to many of the original founders and employees, studied board meeting minutes, looked through source code, and done everything we could to tell the story of Infocom's history in a fair and accurate way. As of Friday, our project has concluded. Our report and presentation, entitled "Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.", is available online in both PDF of the paper and a PDF of the presentation. The presentation was given on December 13th in a quasi-public forum to members of EECS, STS, the MIT community, and some former employees of Infocom." Ah, Infocom. Many a day was whiled away trying to figure the syntax for the next command *grin*.

Re:Hitchhiker's

They didn't need to. Infocom produced a virtual machine for all their adventure games, with interpreters for different platforms. The same data file can be used on a PC, a Spectrum and an Osbourne providing that you have an interpreter that supports that version of the machine. Someone wrote an interpreter in Java, but the data file used is still the same as the one included on the original HHGTG disks.

Re:Infocom vs LucasArts

The thing is, coming completely fresh into the puzzle, you don't know certain things exist, but if you've done the puzzle before, you already have a clue, so that's not the same. As an example, until the robot comes out of the panel, you are not told the panel is there. Sure, you could "look panel" since you know the panel is there, but the description of the room doesn't mention it. So you 'waste' a death as you get everything set up to the point, press the button, and then the panel is introduced; you don't have enough time in turns to get everything in place again before you are shot.

I'm not critical of this, just that this is a distinctive Infocom style compared to LucasArts or most other modern adventure games.

Don't forget Scott Adams Adventures

For those of us that cut our teeth on an Apple ][ (not + , c, or e), the old Scott Adams Adventures are still available here [msadams.com]. Click on the Classic Games Download link.

He's got Pirate Adventure, The Count, etc. Gotta love those two-word parsers. Also available for the Palm, tho I haven't tried them out.

DT
--

Americans: don't kill ftp.gmd.de

Use the American mirrors:

• http://www.ifarchive.org/ infocom-presentation.pdf [ifarchive.org] and infocom-paper.pdf [ifarchive.org]
• http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ infocom-presentation.pdf [wustl.edu] and infocom-paper.pdf [wustl.edu]

Modern day interactive fiction

This is only tangentially related to the story, but at least its not a Nth post post.

There's still a following for games built around craftily written descriptions and puzzles. In fact new textual interactive fiction pieces are developed by a small buy loyal fanbase. Some of the games are really good.

There's information about the current state of the (well, somewhat ancient in internet time) art of interactive fiction here [ifarchive.org].

Re:Hitchhiker's

If you want you can play it online! here [douglasadams.com]

More information about Infocom

Details about infocom and their game titles are available here [beebware.com], while more about Interactive Fiction (that's text based games usually) can be found here [beebware.com]. The main IF archive can be found at IFArchive.org [ifarchive.org] where you can download many of Infocoms [beebware.com] games.
Richy C.

xyzzy

I wonder how many systems are still protected by this magic Zork password.

Re:xyzzy

In fact, it was Adventure (or, for the real fans, ADVENTUR -- 8 character limit, you see). It would have been interesting if the paper had gone into the history of THAT excellent game.

Of course, the other password was plugh...

It is very dark. If you continue, you are likely to be eaten by a Grue.

Infocom vs LucasArts

I'm not trying to compare the companies here, but more of their approaches to the adventure type games. With Infocom games, you learn how to solve the puzzles when you fail to do certain tasks within certain "times" resulting in the death of your player (eg, you could NOT, without dying at least once, *learn* what you had to do and setup the babel fish puzzle before the gaurds came and took you away. as long as you knew to put the robe on the hook, etc, and did everything else without missing a turn, you had two extra turns before the guards retrieved you.). In most LucasArts adventure games (Monkey Island series, The Dig), you can't die, and you can't do certain things to get you in a dead end; instead there are countless numbers of visual and dialog hints. For myself, I always got frustrated at Infocom's puzzles, some of them rather vague, and many rather tedious (the maze in Leather Goddess, for example), though the enjoyment for succeeding in these puzzles was satisfactory. For many of the LucasArts games, you usually can figure out the puzzles and solutions, and while the reward of solving them might be short, the fun is usually in the red herrings or the side conversions (for example, in the recently released Escape from MI, about 75% of the dialoge from characters is completely unhelpful to solving the puzzles, but it's a continuation of the stories of characters from the other 3 installments of the MI series).

Infocom - masters of the written word

Ah, Infocom. Many a day was whiled away trying to figure the syntax for the next command *grin*.

Actually, no, Infocom's market dominance was based on the fact their parser was flexible and powerful, and you didn't need to play 'hunt the verb'.

Usual links:

• GMD ifarchive of new and old interactive games [ifarchive.org]
• Frotz, infocom game player for all machines (including Windows and Linux) [dmoz.org]
• Nitfol, an even better infocom game player [ifarchive.org]
• About.com guide to IF [about.com]
• unofficial Infocom page with some freebie Zork downloads [csd.uwo.ca]
• Most of the Infocom games (Amiga games site, but the data files work on all platforms with Frotz) [back2roots.org]