ICOM Simulations

~ the goodbye ~

Shadowgate shipped on 30 July 1987. I was three years old and about eleven years from my first modem, so this one is archaeology rather than memory. The hardware widens the gap further: the original Macintosh was not a machine you found in Turkish homes in the late eighties, and by the time I got online in 1998 the studio that made it had been dissolved for five months.

ICOM Simulations began as TMQ Software on 4 March 1981, founded by Tod Zipnick in Wheeling, Illinois. What it became known for was a run of four games between 1985 and 1988 that the company called the MacVenture series. Deja Vu arrived on 10 July 1985, Uninvited in March 1986, Shadowgate in July 1987, Deja Vu II in 1988.

Adventure games in 1985 meant a parser. You typed a command and hoped the program knew the word you had chosen. ICOM's games had no parser at all. You clicked a verb from a list down the side of the screen and then clicked whatever you wanted the verb applied to, and your inventory was a window you dragged objects out of. That is the point-and-click adventure interface, shipping in a commercial product a bit over two years before Maniac Mansion did the same thing on the Commodore 64.

Zipnick did not get to see most of what came after. He died of Hodgkin's disease in 1991, with the company grown from roughly 25 people in 1989 to 45, and the Chicago Tribune ran his obituary on 9 July that year. Two years later Viacom bought the studio.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Before the sale, ICOM had already moved past the Macintosh. In 1990 it partnered with NEC to develop for the TurboGrafx-16, and it became one of the bigger American third-party developers on a console that never sold well outside Japan. The CD attachment was the reason. ICOM built some of the first console games to carry full motion video cutscenes, and Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective put filmed actors on a television years before that was ordinary.

Beyond Shadowgate followed in 1993 as a TurboGrafx exclusive, which is a strange fate for a sequel to a game most people had played on a Mac or an NES. It stayed on that console, and on a console that sold in the low millions in the United States against tens of millions of Genesis and NES units.

~ what came after ~

Viacom acquired the company in 1993 and renamed it Viacom New Media. The output changed immediately. The studio that had invented a genre interface spent the next three years shipping licensed cartridges: Beavis and Butt-Head, Rocko's Modern Life, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, a Congo tie-in, a puzzle game called Zoop. Viacom closed the operation in 1997, renamed the shell Rabid Entertainment, and dissolved it on 14 February 1998. The date survives because somebody filed a trademark registration for the new name six weeks later.

The games outlived the company by a wide margin. David Marsh picked up most of the ICOM rights in January 2012, and former staff formed Zojoi that March to rebuild Shadowgate. Nothing of the Wheeling office remains, but every adventure game you have ever played with a cursor and an inventory window is downstream of four Macintosh titles made by fewer than fifty people in suburban Illinois.

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