Like several other implementors, Amy Briggs began working at Infocom as a game tester before designing games.

Although Infocom started out with Zork, and although the Zork world was the centerpiece of their product line throughout the Zork and Enchanter series, the company quickly branched out into a wide variety of story lines: fantasy, science-fiction, mystery, horror, historical adventure, children's stories, and others that defied categories.

And to compete with the Leisure Suit Larry style games that were also appearing, Infocom also came out with Leather Goddesses of Phobos in 1986, which featured " tame ", " suggestive ", and " lewd " playing modes, and that was notable for including among its " feelies " a " scratch-and-sniff " card with six odors that corresponded to six cues during the game.

And a final disappointment was that Cornerstone was available only for IBM PCs and not any of the other platforms that Infocom supported for their games ; while Cornerstone had been programmed with its own virtual machine for maximum portability, that feature had become essentially irrelevant.

Davis believed that his company had paid too much for Infocom and initiated a lawsuit against them to recoup some of the cost, along with changing the way Infocom was run.

Infocom had traditionally produced about four games per year with more staff than they had post-merger.

Rising costs and falling profits, exacerbated by the lack of new products in 1988 and technical issues with its MS-DOS products, caused Activision finally to pull the plug on Infocom in 1989.

* Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom ( 1996 ; contained 33 Infocom games plus six winners of the SPAG Interactive Fiction Contest not affiliated with Infocom )

* Interactive Text In An Animated Age: Infocom Faces The Challenge article, an interview with Joel Berez and Marc Blank from Compute!

* The Infocom Gallery with photos of all game boxes, feelies, instruction manuals and extra game contents.

* The Gallery of Zork an updated version of the Infocom Gallery with higher-resolution photos, more material, such as more photos of earlier packaging, and online playable versions of the Infocom games.

Three of the original Zork programmers joined with others to found Infocom in 1979.

The dungeons are stocked with many novel creatures, objects and locations, among them grues, zorkmids, and Flood Control Dam # 3 — all of which are referenced by subsequent Infocom text adventures.

** Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz ( 1988, Infocom, text with some graphics )

Infocom itself used extensions of. dat ( Data ) and. zip ( ZIP = Z-machine Interpreter Program ), but the latter clashes with the present widespread use of. zip for PKZIP-compatible archive files starting in the 1990s, after Activision had shut down Infocom.

Still, Suspended was a highly regarded game ; science fiction writer Douglas Adams, an early fan of Infocom games, was particularly taken with it.

Two text-based adventure games with sparse graphics were produced for the Amiga and PC, and marketed as James Clavell's Shōgun, by Infocom, and Shōgun ( Mastertronic ).

While this made sense for the graphically intensive games that made up the rest of Activision's catalog, since Infocom games were text based, it didn't make sense-the newer games didn't have improved text.

Activision's 1996 compilation, Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom, includes all the text-based Zork games ; the Zork and Enchanter trilogies, Wishbringer, Beyond Zork and Zork Zero.

It won the TADS category at the inaugural 1995 Interactive Fiction Competition and was included on Activision's 1996 commercial release of Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom.

With the Z-machine, Infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers of the day simultaneously — the Apple II family, Atari 800, IBM PC compatibles, Amstrad CPC / PCW ( one disc worked on both machines ), Commodore 64, Commodore Plus / 4, Commodore 128, Kaypro CP / M, Texas Instruments TI-99 / 4A, the Mac, Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga and the Radio Shack TRS-80.

Inspired by Colossal Cave, Marc Blank and Dave Lebling created what was to become the first Infocom game, Zork, in 1977 at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science.

Whereas most computer games of the era would achieve initial success and then suffer a significant drop-off in sales, Infocom titles continued to sell for years and years.

Unlike most computer software, Infocom titles were distributed under a no-returns policy, which allowed them to make money from a single game for a longer period of time.

Next, Infocom titles featured strong storytelling and rich descriptions, eschewing the day's primitive graphic capabilities, allowing users to use their own imaginations for the lavish and exotic locations the games described.

Sometimes, though, Infocom threw in puzzles just for the humor of it — if the user never ran into these, they could still finish the game just fine.

Reviewers were also consistently disappointed that Infocom — noted for the natural language syntax of their games — did not include a natural language query ability, which was the most expected feature for this database.

* Infocom had a successful marketing approach that kept all their games in store inventories for years.

This marketing approach cut off potential revenue for numerous Infocom titles that had consistently brought in money for several years.

In addition, Zork was written on the PDP-10, and Infocom used several PDP-10s for game development and testing.

The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games.

Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions ( called story files, or Z-code files ), and could therefore port all its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform.

Infocom games are text adventures where users direct the action by entering short strings of words to give commands when prompted.

Infocom games were written using a roughly LISP-like programming language called ZIL ( Zork Implementation Language or Zork Interactive Language — it was referred to as both ) that compiled into a byte code able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the Z-machine.

Whereas most game developers sold their games mainly in software stores, Infocom also distributed their games via bookstores.

Since their games were text-based, patrons of bookstores were drawn to the Infocom games as they were already interested in reading.

Infocom also released a small number of " interactive fiction paperbacks " ( gamebooks ), which were based on the games and featured the ability to choose a different path through the story.

Infocom had sunk much of the money from games sales into Cornerstone ; this, in addition to a slump in computer game sales, left the company in a very precarious financial position.

* Davis pushed Infocom to release more graphical games, but the one they did release, Fooblitzky, bombed.

For a few years, Activision continued to market Infocom's classic games in collections ( usually by genre, such as the Science Fiction collection ); in 1991, they published The Lost Treasures of Infocom, followed in 1992 by The Lost Treasures of Infocom II.

* The Lost Treasures of Infocom ( 1991 ; contained 20 of Infocom's interactive fiction games )

* The Lost Treasures of Infocom II ( 1992 ; contained 11 interactive fiction games )