Infocom

USA · Founded 1979 · Closed 1989 · 1979 – 1989

Infocom produced the finest interactive fiction of the personal computer era — Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Planescape precursor Trinity — writing games with literary ambition that no other studio approached, before Activision's acquisition made their survival impossible.

Infocom was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1979 by a group of MIT students and researchers including Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson, who had been developing a text adventure game called Zork on MIT's mainframe systems. Zork — a direct descendant of Crowther and Woods's Adventure, the original text adventure — was split into three commercial products (Zork I, II, and III) and released across multiple personal computer platforms beginning in 1980. The technical innovation that made this possible was the Z-machine: a virtual computer specification that Infocom's games were compiled to and interpreted on, allowing a single game to run on any platform that had a Z-machine interpreter. This approach — portable virtual machine code rather than native binary — was innovative in 1979 and directly anticipates the Java Virtual Machine model that Sun would commercialise fifteen years later. The quality of Infocom's writing distinguished its games from all competition. Where other text adventures described rooms in functional sentences and accepted limited vocabulary, Infocom's parser understood natural language constructs of considerable complexity and the games were written by people with genuine literary ability. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984), written by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky, was simultaneously a puzzle game and a comedy that worked on its own terms as humour — a dual achievement that no other game of the era came close to. Trinity (1986), written by Brian Moriarty, engaged with the history of nuclear weapons testing through an allegorical fantasy structure that was genuinely affecting as fiction. A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985) was an explicit political satire of Reaganite American policy — almost certainly the first commercial game to engage directly with contemporary political argument. Planescape would later cite Infocom's approach to text-driven narrative as an influence on its own writing ambitions. Infidel (1983), Suspended (1983), and Deadline (1982) explored mystery, science fiction, and horror respectively, each adapting the text adventure format to genre conventions with intelligence and craft. Deadline was the first commercial mystery game and is considered the ancestor of the point-and-click adventure mystery genre. The Infocom catalogue, at its peak covering over thirty titles, was the most consistent body of quality in any publisher's history for the era — a standard that derived from the company's insistence on hiring writers who could write and designers who understood that puzzle logic and narrative structure needed to function together. Activision acquired Infocom in 1986, and the acquisition effectively terminated the creative conditions that had produced the company's output. Activision wanted Infocom to produce graphical games and to reduce the text-heavy format that had limited its commercial reach — a misunderstanding of what Infocom's audience valued. Bureaucratic interference, the shift of key staff to graphics-based projects, and the general collapse of the text adventure market as home computer graphics improved combined to end Infocom's output. The final Infocom title was released in 1989; the company was formally dissolved that year. The Z-machine specification survived: the interactive fiction community has maintained and extended it for decades, and thousands of hobbyist text adventures continue to be written in Inform and other Z-machine-targeting languages.