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.

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.

When they joined to form Infocom, Zork was a natural choice as a first product because it was practically complete and didn't require much up-front funding.

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.

There are currently at least four Infocom sampler and demos available from the IF Archive as Z-machine story files which require a Z-machine interpreter to play.

* Infocom company profile from MobyGames

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

* 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.

* Covers of the Infocom boxes from Retrology: Gregor's retro-video games website

* Bureaucracy information from the Infocom Gallery with photos of the entire contents of the game ( manual, feelies, etc.

Dave Lebling introduced a similar monster, whose name was borrowed from Vance's grues, into the interactive fiction computer game Zork, published by Infocom.

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.

The game featured no copy protection as such, but like many Infocom games, it included puzzles that were nearly impossible to solve without hints from the accompanying documentation ( the so-called feelies ).

: The large emerald is also one of the Twenty Treasures of Zork from the Infocom text adventure Zork I.

A few Infocom games featured puzzles with multiple solutions ( for example, the " Loud Room " from Zork I ).

* Wishbringer information from the Infocom Gallery with photos of the entire contents of the game ( manual, feelies, etc.

The Lost Treasures of Infocom is a collection of 20 computer games from interactive fiction pioneer Infocom, released in 1991.

* The Infocom Gallery with images of most feelies from the Infocom games

Frotz, a modern open-source interpreter for Infocom games ( as well as independently written interactive fiction ) draws its name from a spell (" cause object to glow with illumination ") in Enchanter and its sequels.

The Ur-Grue character in Beyond Zork may be a reference to Brian Moriarty himself, the creator of the game, who is notably absent from the game's portrayal of an " Implementors ' Luncheon ", where each Implementor is recognizably based on a member of the Infocom staff.

* The Lurking Horror information from the Infocom Gallery with photos of the entire contents of the game ( manual, feelies, etc.

Previous games by Infocom used a parser evolved from the one in Zork I, but for Zork Zero, they designed a new LALR parser from scratch.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* 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 )

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