_ ________

Dave Lebling

Marc Blank

_
Brian __________Steve
Moriarty __________Meretzky

INFOCOM CLASSICS

- ZORK
- PLANETFALL
- A MIND FOREVER VOYAGING
- TRINITY
- HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE
__GALAXY
- LEATHER GODDESSES OF PHOBOS
- THE LURKING HORROR
- SHOGUN
- ARTHUR

(full game, manual and
walkthrough downloads!)

__ALL INFOCOM GAMES HERE!

LINKS

- Infocom archive
- Infocom Gallery
- The Master Storytellers

INFOCOM - THE PIONEERS OF INTERACTIVE FICTION ___check the classics

COLOSSAL ZORK

It all started with "ADVENTURE" (or "Colossal Cave"), a text-based game in which
you had to collect treasures in a gigantic cave, written in 1972. This rudimentary
game, vastly improved in 1976, became highly popular among students at the Boston
University, who played it by accessing the mainframe over ARPAnet (the ancestor of
what today is the Internet).

Dave Lebling, student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), part
of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science ("LCS") and a big Dungeons and Dragons
fan, started to program something better and more sophisticated than "Adventure".
Lebling and his friends designed maps and puzzles for players to solve and named
this new project "Zork" - a hacker word floating around at that time.

PARSER AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The result wasn't just any adventure game, however. The goal of the game's
designers was to allow the computer to understand more typical English sentences
than the simplistic and often infuriating two-word parser of previous adventure
games. So finally, a man named Marc Blank applied his artificial intelligence work
at the MIT and created ZIL (Zork Interactive Language), a "parser" which allowed
the program to find associations between sentences and, hence, better understand
what the player wanted to do.

THE GREAT INFOCOM EMPIRE

Students at M.I.T. responded so favorably to the mainframe version of Zork that
on June 22, 1979 INFOCOM was formed for the express purpose of developing Zork for
the personal computer market. Lebling, Berez and Blank, the founders of Infocom,
also tried to find a way that would allow to bring Zork to other computer systems
like the APPLE II or the TRS-80, which were highly successful at that time, and
came up with a genius system to do so. They designed a special programming
language, which through an emulator could run on any computer and called it "Z-
Machine." The games itself were written in this special 'Zork Implementation
Language' (ZIL) and could be played on every different system via the help of an
interpreter program, the Z-interpreter. In this way it was possible to enter the
vastly expanding home computer market, overall "Zork I" sold over 1.000.000 copies
on various platforms over the years.

Then ZORK II came, the first real Infocom release, and proved highly successful.
Other talents like Steve Meretzky or Brian Moriarty joined the company, and the
golden years of Infocom began. Countless masterpieces like TRINITY or A MIND
FOREVER VOYAGING were produced, still unmatched in dense prose, cunning puzzles,
incredible ideas and - not to forget - a great sense of humour. The original games
came in nice packages and meanwhile legendary freebies like the sundial with
TRINITY or the scratch'n'sniff-card along with LEATHER GODDESS OF PHOBOS. You
should definitely check some of the classics, all highly recommended!

THE FALL OF INFOCOM

In the mid-80s faster computers with faster processors and better graphical
qualities (like the C64, the Amiga and Atari ST) were introduced and players
shifted their preferences to games with graphics, animations and sound. While lots
of management mistakes were made the sales for text adventures went down and the
company into an economical crisis. Even after ACTIVISION bought Infocom there were
problems to get along with the market changes and they were forced to make
concessions. So in 1987, "Beyond Zork," written by Brian Moriarty, became the first
Infocom game to feature a graphical user interface. It had a map that changed
according to the players movements among other graphic tidbits and also had some
roleplaying elements . To take this development even further, "Zork Zero," written
a year later by Steve Meretzky, came with even more enhanced graphics. But hardcore
fans got alienated by the graphics and new buyers couldn't be attracted. Infocom
still wrote great adventures, but completely lacked the experience of doing
graphical games. Titles like "Journey" failed and finally the original crew
dissolved, INFOCOM became merely a label.