In the 21st century,Infocom isn't better known than it was in the past.
The developer of all-text story games like Hitchhiker's Guide to the GALAXY and the Zork series shut down in 1989, but not before releasing a library of titles that are some of the earliest to demonstrate the potential of video. It's a rich history that's been wasted under the stewardship of the company.
Microsoft is in the process of acquiring the company that makes Call of Duty in a deal worth almost 80 billion dollars. The to-be-acquired publisher's popular franchises like Call of Duty and Overwatch, as well as what the deal means for an employer that's faced a growing number of toxic workplace accusations since last summer, have been the focus of most of the attention. Microsoft could potentially preserve an important piece of gaming history here.
Most of what is popular in gaming is pre-dated by Infocom's hits. The company released a trilogy of Zork games before Nintendo's first console, the Famicom, arrived in Japan. These games and others opened people's eyes to a different type of experience than they were used to seeing from arcade hits like Frogger.
This lineup of games had a story to tell, and in a way that gave players a sense of agency over how the plot would proceed. In their moment, the rudimentary text inputs that had us typing out cardinal directions to move through the world and basic actions like "get" or "look at" to interact created the illusion of a virtual landscape where anything was possible.
A serious-minded approach to world-building involved filling every game box with "feelies." The objects that helped color out the margins of the game world were tangible.
Nintendo's first console, the Famicom, was released in Japan, but not before the release of an entire trilogy of Zork games.
The world started to come online in the late '80s as graphics replaced text. One of the players responsible for selling the idea that gaming at home could impart a different kind of experience than arcades is still a vital figure in gaming history.
Ask any games-loving Gen X or older people in your life what they remember about Infocom and you'll get at least a few who light up. I still carry a torch for A Mind Forever Voyaging, a thoughtful interactive adventure from creator Steve Meretzky that casts players as an artificial intelligence researcher that teaches itself about the human experience by traveling through different points in a fictional person's life.
The studio founded by a bunch of college-age computer nerds figured out that there were merits to building games for an audience that wanted something meatier than a maze while avoiding ghosts. The Lurking Horror gave players the chance to solve story puzzles in a horror setting. Bureaucracy made fun of capitalism and government processes. The game adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide may be the studio's best known release.
It wasn't clear what to do withInfocom. When the brand and associated studio were acquired, there was not much discussion about game preservation. Even though we've started to think more about protecting gaming's past, there's still no infocom material.
The Lost Treasures of Infocom was the studio's best release to date. The Lost Treasures app was launched in the '90s as a two-part compendium, but it turned out to be a virtual storehouse of feelies for each game and an app that was very good.
It was rendered useless when Apple stopped supporting 32-bit apps on the platform. When I want to embark on an Infocom adventure, I keep an old iPhone 3GS at my desk. The studio that built the app never took any other steps to preserve the release of the app. Since then, So Lost Treasures has been in the shadows.
Over the years, fans and preservationists have worked hard to ensure that major pieces of Infocom's history aren't lost. The Internet Archive's "Infocom Cabinet" is filled with documents donated by Meretzky and is edited by Scott who directed a documentary about text adventures called Get Lamp. Meretzky donated his original materials to the university. There are other questionable ways to interact with Infocom's games.
Fans of Infocom can feel hope now that Microsoft is in charge. Call of Duty is the biggest of the big franchises, and that's what the way of doing things is for. Microsoft has been more interested in maintaining a deep bench with its Game Pass and ID@Xbox programs. Thanks to Microsoft's efforts to make each new Xbox machine compatible with as many older games as possible, preservation has become part of the Xbox DNA.
Unfortunately, the Xbox maker isn't willing to go on the record at this point with any thoughts regarding its plans for Infocom, and that's assuming such plans exist at this point. It's clear that Microsoft is better positioned to be the steward of the library than it is currently.
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