Infocom

» see infocom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Zork was written on a PDP-10 at MIT starting in 1977, on a machine nobody owned personally and everybody shared. The company was incorporated on 22 June 1979 by the people who had written it, staff and students out of the Lab for Computer Science, and its original purpose was narrow: take the mainframe game and make it fit inside a home computer. Marc Blank and Dave Lebling are the two names that survived into the credits, though there were ten founders.

The engineering decision that mattered was not the writing. Infocom compiled its games down to bytecode for a small virtual machine, the Z-machine, and then wrote a fresh interpreter for every home computer worth selling to. One game could ship on more than twenty incompatible platforms with the story file untouched. That was a distribution trick in 1980. It is the reason the games are still playable in 2026, which was not the plan.

The peak is easy to date. On 12 December 1983, all ten Infocom titles were sitting on the Softsel top 40 chart at once. Zork I sold 380,000 copies by 1986 and the trilogy 680,000, about a third of the roughly two million games the company sold in total. The boxes came with props, and the props became the argument for buying the box instead of copying the disk. Nothing in any of it was drawn.

Infocom closed in may 1989, when I was five years old. The product was a paragraph of American English waiting for you to type back a verb it recognized, which is a hard thing to export in any decade, and Turkey in the late eighties was not importing many home computers to type it on. The only honest route from here to those games is the one most people take now, a story file and an interpreter, thirty years after the studio that made them stopped existing.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

Cornerstone was a relational database for businesspeople, released in 1985 at $495. Infocom built it on the same portable virtual machine idea that made the games work everywhere, which meant it ran slowly and refused to take advantage of the PC hardware that was busy becoming the only hardware that mattered. It sold about 10,000 copies and did not come close to earning back what it cost. The game money paid for it.

Activision bought the company on 13 June 1986 for $7.5 million and immediately laid off half of the hundred staff. At the end of that year Activision's board replaced Jim Levy with Bruce Davis, who had opposed the purchase from the start. What followed was three years of a text adventure studio being run by someone who did not believe in text adventures, with rising internal production costs charged against a catalog whose whole economic advantage had been that it was cheap to make.

~ the day it died ~

A memo went around Cambridge in the first days of may 1989 calling everyone to a meeting on the afternoon of Thursday the fourth. Management ordered dinner in, which was the tell. Operations formally ended on 5 may 1989 with 26 people left in the building. Eleven were offered a move to Activision's offices in California and five took it. The name was kept alive as a label on re-releases into the nineties and was finally abandoned around 2002.

~ what replaced it ~

The Z-machine was reverse engineered by hobbyists, and free interpreters have existed for every platform since the mid-nineties. The story files from a company that has been dead since the first Bush administration run on phones. A whole amateur scene grew up writing new games in the same format, with its own authoring language and its own annual competition, and it is still going.

What did not survive is the box. The maps and the plastic trinkets that came in the packaging were an anti-piracy measure and a marketing argument at once, and there is no digital equivalent. You can download every Infocom game ever made in a few seconds. The part people actually miss cannot be downloaded.

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