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Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called Cornerstone.
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especially as the TOPS-10 operating system became widely used.
Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.
Steven Eric Meretzky is an American video game developer. He is best known for creating Infocom games in the early 1980s, including collaborating with author Douglas Adams on the interactive fiction version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of the first games to be certified "platinum" by the Software Publishers Association. Later, he created the Spellcasting trilogy, the flagship adventure series of Legend Entertainment. He has been involved in almost every aspect of game development, from design to production to quality assurance and box design.
Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the player explores a cave system rumored to be filled with treasure and gold. The game is composed of dozens of locations, and the player moves between these locations and interacts with objects in them by typing one- or two-word commands which are interpreted by the game's natural language input system. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's attempted actions. It is the first well-known example of interactive fiction, as well as the first well-known adventure game, for which it was also the namesake.
William Crowther is an American computer programmer, caver, and rock climber. He is the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure from 1975 onward, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of video game design and inspired the text adventure game genre.
Phoenix was an IBM mainframe computer at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory. "Phoenix/MVS" was also the name of the computer's operating system, written in-house by Computer Laboratory members. Its DNS hostname was phx.cam.ac.uk.
Peter David Lebling is an American interactive fiction game designer (implementor) and programmer who has worked at various companies, including Infocom and Avid.
MDL is a programming language, a descendant of the language Lisp. Its initial purpose was to provide high level language support for the Dynamic Modeling Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Project MAC. It was developed in 1971 on a PDP-10 running ITS and later ran on TENEX, TOPS-20, BSD, and AEGIS.
Cornerstone is a relational database for MS-DOS released by Infocom, a company best known in the 1980s for developing interactive fiction video games. Initially hailed upon release in 1985 for its ease of use, a series of shortcomings and changes in the market kept Cornerstone from achieving success. It is considered a key factor in Infocom's demise.
Enchanter is an interactive fiction game written by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling and published by Infocom in 1983. The first fantasy game published by Infocom after the Zork trilogy, it was originally intended to be Zork IV. The game has a parser that understands over 700 words, making it the most advanced interactive fiction game of its time. It was Infocom's ninth game.
Deadline is an interactive fiction detective video game published by Infocom in 1982. Written by Marc Blank, it was Infocom's third game. It was released for the Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Osborne 1, TRS-80, and later for the Amiga and Atari ST.
Marc Blank is an American game developer and software engineer. He is best known as part of the team that created one of the first commercially successful text adventure computer games, Zork. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.
Michael Berlyn was an American video game designer and writer. He was best known as an implementer at Infocom, part of the text adventure game design team. He is also known as the designer behind Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind (1993) and Bubsy 3D (1996).
A text game or text-based game is an electronic game that uses a text-based user interface, that is, the user interface employs a set of encodable characters, such as ASCII, instead of bitmap or vector graphics.
Donald R. Woods is an American hacker and computer programmer. He is best known for his role in the development of the Colossal Cave Adventure game.
Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD, is the first MUD.
Albert Vezza was an American computer science professor and a founder of video game company Infocom.
Bruce Daniels is an American hydroclimatologist, business executive and computer programmer. He is known in Silicon Valley as one of the pioneers of the personal computer and user-friendly interfaces.
References
- ↑ Woyke, Elizabeth (August 22, 2017). "The Enduring Legacy of Zork". MIT Technology Review.
- 1 2 3 4 "GDC 2014 - Zork Post-Mortem". Adventure Gamers. May 2, 2014.
- 1 2 3 4 Anderson, Tim; Galley, Stu. "The History of Zork". Archived from the original on January 16, 2009. Retrieved June 27, 2023.
- 1 2 3 4 Briceno, Hector; Chao, Wesley; Glenn, Andrew; Hu, Stanley; Krishnamurthy, Ashwin; Tsuchida, Bruce (December 15, 2000). "Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc".
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - ↑ Lammle, Rob (June 15, 2014). "A Brief History of Zork".
- ↑ Nooney, Laine (Fall 2017). "Let's Begin Again". American Journal of Play. 10.
- ↑ Rouse, Richard (2004). Game Design: Theory and Practice (2 ed.). p. 180. ISBN 9781556229121.
- ↑ Ivory, James (2012). Virtual Lives. ABC-CLIO. p. 124. ISBN 9781598845860.
- ↑ "Stick to What You Know: Infocom and the Perils of Expansion". The Computer History Museum.
- ↑ Waldrop, Mitchell (January 1, 2000). "Computing's Johnny Appleseed". MIT Technology Review.
- 1 2 McNamara, Neal (March 22, 2023). "Sudbury 2023 Candidate Profile: Timothy Anderson, Goodnow Board". Sudbury Patch.
- ↑ Marcott, Amy (July 15, 2009). "Five MIT-Developed Video Games that Revolutionized the Industry". Slice of MIT.
- ↑ "About Tim". Tim Anderson for Goodnow Library. February 20, 2022. Retrieved June 28, 2023.
- ↑ Razzaq, Zane (March 10, 2022). "Friends again? Four vie for two seats on Sudbury Board of Library Trustees". MetroWest Daily News.