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 (called, actually, z-code) and distributed with a P-code
interpreter core, and not only open-source 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 being written. There is a home page at
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/,
and it is even possible to play these games in your browser if it is
Java-capable.
