Infocom, founded in 1979, were one of the great studios of the early days of PC gaming, responsible for classics like the Zork series. They may be long gone (Infocom were shut down in 1989), but their history lives on in this incredible collection of old documents.
Uploaded to Archive.org by the creators of the excellent GET LAMP documentary, the collection — at around 9000 pages in full, though not quite everything has been made available online — was amassed by former Infocom employee Steven Meretzky. GET LAMP’s creator Jason Scott then scanned most of the it before the originals were handed over to Stanford University’s library for safe-keeping.
It’s an astonishing look at the creation of some of PC gaming’s classics, with everything from photos to hand-written design notes from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy to internal documents like phone lists and pages and pages of code included in the collection.
You can have a dig through everything yourself here.
“… our credit is no longer good at the Golden Banana.”
Total Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends.
Comments
9 responses to “Dig Through The Archives Of A Closed Developer”
Oh wow, that’s a nostalgia blast and a half… Infocom. Good times.
Haha – Leather Goddesses was amazing, and H2G2 was too. Such great writing.
If you ever feel like sticking a babel fish in your ear, cruising the canals of Mars, or being eaten by a grue, you can play some of the old games here:
http://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/
NICE. Thanks for the link!
I wish somebody would re-release the Lost Treasures of Infocom compilations in a more modern form. A new generation needs to discover the Babelfish puzzle. Not to mention Plundered Hearts – an interactive bodice-ripper.
There’s a small selection available on GOG, but it’s largely limited to the Zork titles.
Sadly the odds of the release including all the nice extras is zero.
It’s available on iPad
https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/lost-treasures-of-infocom/id577626745?mt=8
I think a few of the games can also be obtained for Android using the Z-Machine app – jFrotz. You’ll need to find the .Z5 files for the games themselves.
“Infocom presents… the Crescent Hawks Revenge”. My very first foray into the world of Battletech. Good times.
This article just gave me a great nostalgic kick.
I miss the sounds of my 5.25 drive loading. It just hasn’t been the same.
I immediately heard the sound of my 810 grinding and then beeping away..
Back when opening the packaging on a game was an adventure in itself.
Believe it or not, i think i had the majority of my learning of worldly events in those thick manuals that Microprose use to do for their flight simulators(Gunship 2000, F15 Strike Eagle, F117A Nighthawk, F19 stealth Fighter so on and so on…) than any history lesson given to me at school. Hell I still remember how thick the manual was for Falcon 3.0 in its full binder glory. Then you had the fantasy games like Ultima with their cloth maps, or the neat little stuff that Sierra and Dynamix use to do. Yes… opening the box was indeed a grand adventure in itself! 😀