* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Suspended

* Infocom Bugs List entry

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Bureaucracy

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for A Mind Forever Voyaging

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Leather Goddesses of Phobos

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Wishbringer

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Starcross

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Trinity

* The Infocom Bugs List entry on Beyond Zork

* The Infocom Bugs List entry on The Lurking Horror

* The Infocom Bugs List entry on Arthur

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Zork Zero

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Sorcerer

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Spellbreaker

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Deadline

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Infidel

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for The Witness

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Seastalker

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Suspect

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Ballyhoo

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Hollywood Hijinx

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Stationfall

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Moonmist

* The Infocom Bugs List entry for Border Zone

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

* The Infocom Gallery entry on Starcross including photos of the box, feelies and entire manual ( PDF format )

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

* Infocom Documentation Project-Group working with Activision's permission to recreate manuals for Infocom games in PDF and text formats.

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 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.