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Jason Scott, connoisseur of all things old-timey, knows (and loves) his gaming history. His Flickr gallery shows this. It also shows, remarkably, that he’s got a copy of the lifetime sales figures of a bunch of Infocom games. Infocom being the developers of games like Zork and Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. It’s fascinating stuff, especially when you consider that shifting 380,000 units of Zork between 1981 and 1986 is, relatively, shifting a lotta units.
Great Scott: Infocom’s All-Time Sales Numbers Revealed [GameSetWatch]
Working weekends here at Kotaku means that we can’t lay claim to articles when we find them — and I’m constantly amazed as to what interesting articles I’ve come across have (and haven’t) been posted by the time I stumble in on Saturday mornings. This week, it was the ‘Infocom Drive,’ a complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989 — including a whole lot of discussion and documentation about the unreleased sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It’s an interesting look at the internal workings of Infocom and a look at a game that never was:
This is an oldie (appearing in 2006) but goodie if you’re interested in interactive fiction — Jimmy Maher wrote a lengthy, well-written and comprehensive history of interactive fiction, from Eliza to the era of Infocom to the state of IF today. It’s a fascinating wrap up, even if you’re not one of the handful of active IF players; but IF’s fall from commercial grace hasn’t stopped IF creators from trundling on to creating bigger and better things:
