A now-legendary games company, active from
1979 to 1989, that commercialized the MDL parser technology used
for Zork to produce a line of text adventure games that remain
favorites among hackers. Infocom's games were intelligent, funny,
witty, erudite, irreverent, challenging, satirical, and most
thoroughly hackish in spirit. The physical game packages from
Infocom are now prized collector's items. After being acquired by
Activision in 1989 they did a few more "modern"
(e.g. graphics-intensive) games which were less successful than
reissues of their classics.
The software, thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were
written in a kind of P-code and distributed with a P-code
interpreter core, and not only freeware emulators for that
interpreter but an actual compiler as well have been written to
permit the P-code to be run on platforms the games never originally
graced. In fact, new games written in this P-code are still bering
written. (Emulators that can run Infocom game ZIPs, and new games,
are available at
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu:/doc/misc/if-archive/infocom.)
Related:
ADVENT /ad'vent/ n.
The prototypical computer
adventure game first designed by Will Crowther on the PDP-10
in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming,
and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford
in 1976....
grue n.
[from archaic English verb for `shudder' as
with fear] The grue was originated in the game Zork (Dave
Lebling took the name from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth"
fantasies) and used in several other Infocom games as a hint
that you should perhaps look for a lamp, torch or some type of
light source....
