Infocom: from Zork to business software

"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."

If you've never experienced the bliss of staring at the above -- the opening line of text adventure classic Zork -- you're missing out on one of the formative titles in video game history. This week, The Escapist takes a cursory look at Infocom, the company behind Zork, and what became of them. In short, they blew it on a piece of business software called Cornerstone (yuck).

While The Escapist piece (ironically titled "The Short, Happy Life of Infocom") is far too short to encapsulate the company's meteoric success or their similarly swift demise at the hands of Activision, lucky for us, there is an exhaustively researched study done by some MIT students (natch) in 2000 that is still taking up residency on the web. Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc. is available in an easy to read, 50-page PDF here so, if The Escapist piece whets your appetite for text adventure, you can have seconds.

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Interactive phiction: Zork phone demo is online