History Of Infocom aka The Creators Of Zork

halcyon7 writes: "My MIT research group has spent the last two months studying Infocom ^[?] , Inc. (the creators of Zork ^[?] ) in great detail. We have talked to many of the original founders and employees, studied board meeting minutes, looked through source code, and done everything we could to tell the story of Infocom's history in a fair and accurate way. As of Friday, our project has concluded. Our report and presentation, entitled "Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.", is available online in both PDF of the paper and a PDF of the presentation. The presentation was given on December 13th in a quasi-public forum to members of EECS, STS, the MIT community, and some former employees of Infocom." Ah, Infocom. Many a day was whiled away trying to figure the syntax for the next command *grin*.

Comments

Americans: don't kill ftp.gmd.de

[kyz]

Use the American mirrors:

• http://www.ifarchive.org/ infocom-presentation.pdf and infocom-paper.pdf
• http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ infocom-presentation.pdf and infocom-paper.pdf

Modern day interactive fiction

[eXtro]

This is only tangentially related to the story, but at least its not a Nth post post.

There's still a following for games built around craftily written descriptions and puzzles. In fact new textual interactive fiction pieces are developed by a small buy loyal fanbase. Some of the games are really good.

There's information about the current state of the (well, somewhat ancient in internet time) art of interactive fiction here.

Re:Hitchhiker's

[Barsema]

If you want you can play it online! here