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.

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.

By the time Infocom removed the copy-protection and reduced the price to less than $ 100, it was too late, and the market had moved on to other database solutions.

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.

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

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

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.

Adventure International, owned by Scott and Lexis Adams, had been an early competitor of Infocom, but they went out of business long before Infocom had hit their stride.

In January 2011, SAY Media announced that Infocom, a Japanese IT company, had acquired Six Apart Japan and that as part of the transaction, Infocom would assume responsibility for Movable Type.

Unlike most other Infocom titles, particularly those written by Steve Meretzky, the game had a serious tone and a political theme ; attributes which the company would revisit with the following year's Trinity.

It was also the first of the " Interactive Fiction Plus " line, meaning that AMFV had greater memory requirements, unlike earlier Infocom games that used a less advanced version of the company's Z-machine interpreter.

Some significant omissions from the package were the " feelies " for which Infocom had become known.

It was one of the last games in Infocom's Zork series ; or, rather, one of the last Zork games that many Infocom fans consider " official " ( titles such as Zork: Nemesis and Zork Grand Inquisitor were created after Activision had dissolved Infocom as a company and kept the " brand name ").

Infocom had used these concepts before only in a rather limited way in Zork I and III.

This marked one of the few major additions to the Z-machine with the exception of graphics ; traditionally, Infocom had eschewed such changes in favor of expanding the parser capacity and overall size of game files.

Additionally, this was the first Infocom game in which a speedy typist could theoretically be more successful than a slower one.

* Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc .— A report from MIT which offers a very detailed examination of Infocom's creative successes and marketing failures.

His June 1993 joint paper with Abhay K. Parekh, " A generalized processor sharing approach to flow control " in ISN won the IEEE Communication Society's William Bennett Prize Paper Award " for the best original paper published in the IEEE / ACM Transactions on Networking in the past year " and a preliminary version won the Prize Paper Award for Infocom 1993.

While the acquisition kept Infocom afloat for a few more years, poor management decisions led Activision to close Infocom for good in 1989.

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

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.

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.

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.

Their first products were all illustrated text adventures, some of them designed by Infocom veteran Steve Meretzky.

* The Infocom Gallery entry for A Mind Forever Voyaging with photos of all feelies, manual and decoder table

Still holding the copyright to nearly all the past Infocom titles, Activision bundled 20 of the most popular into this package.

Since all Z-machine games were produced by Infocom, there was also no chance that resources would be shipped in a format which a user's interpreter program could not handle.

The jester in Zork Zero will sometimes say So long, and thanks for all the fish, a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was the basis for another Infocom game.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Personal Software published what would become the first part of the trilogy under the name Zork when it was first released in 1980, but Infocom later handled the distribution of that game and their subsequent games.

* Zork Implementation Language, the language which Infocom used to produce their works of interactive fiction

Infocom sold similar hint books called " invisiclues " for their interactive fiction games.

Aside from a reference to their being " born in places of darkness " on the Inner Planes and a general sense of shapeless menace, they have very little in common with their Infocom namesakes, despite having been introduced soon after the first Zork games and presumably having been inspired by them.

" One significant achievement noted by reviewers was that Infocom was able to contain the entire program on one floppy disk, a bonus provided by their use of their custom virtual machine ( in addition to other facilities, it compressed text ).

Infocom used the term feelie to refer to the extra content included with the boxed versions of their interactive fiction computer games.

Of the 15 ISPs who attended PLDT's presentation, the 5 largest ISPs signified their intention to join the PhIX project by signing the Multi-Lateral Peering Agreement on 19 November 1996, namely: Infocom, IPhil, Moscom, Virtualink and WorldTel Phil.

InvisiClues were hint booklets sold by Infocom to help players solve puzzles in their interactive fiction computer games.

By the time of Arthurs release, Infocom had stopped rating their games in terms of difficulty.

Even for a player who owned an original copy and thus, was more likely to have the letter, it was unusual for an NES game to refer to a physical object that would otherwise just be a novelty ( although Infocom games had been doing this for some time, with the " Feelies " that they included with their games ).

Infocom stopped assigning " difficulty " levels for their games before Zork Zero was released.

Infocom thus started including feelies in their subsequent releases, though not every game required the use of the included feelies.