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.

* 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.

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.

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.

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.

* 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.

Many Infocom titles can be downloaded via the Internet, but only in violation of the copyright.

Only two version 1 files are known to have been released by Infocom, and only two of version 2.

In a somewhat surprising move given the author's popularity, Adams ' name appears only in small print near the bottom of the box's cover, where a blurb reads " by Douglas Adams and the Staff of Infocom.

AMFV was not a conventional Infocom adventure, having only a single puzzle near the end of the game.

Despite its relatively high sales figures, Lurking Horror was the only horror game ever released by Infocom.

Arthur was one of only two games Infocom published under the " Immortal Legends " banner ; the other was the 1987 release Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels.

Border Zone was the only game Infocom ever published in the " Espionage " genre.

Although this was not the only Infocom game designed in an effort to attract female players ( see also Moonmist ), it is the only game in which the lead character is always female.

Journey was the only game released under the " Infocom Roleplay Chronicles " genre.

Aside from the later Infocom computer game ( and, arguably, the movie screenplay ), this is the only co-writer credit in any form of the Hitchhiker's Guide.

One of the last major text-based games published by a major games company other than Infocom, Amnesia is also the only all-text adventure ever published by EA ( The Hound of Shadow, released by EA in, also was largely text-based but featured static graphical screens in its displays to establish setting and atmosphere ).

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.