Infocom
:Infocom: n. A now-legendary games company, active from 1979 to 1989,
that commercialized the MDL parser technology used for Zork
to produce
a line of text adventure games that remain favorites among hackers.
Infocom's games were intelligent, funny, witty, erudite, irreverent,
challenging, satirical, and most thoroughly hackish in spirit. The
physical game packages from Infocom are now prized collector's items.
After being acquired by Activision in 1989 they did a few more "modern"
(e.g. graphics-intensive) games which were less successful than reissues
of their classics.
The software, thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were written
in a kind of P-code and distributed with a P-code interpreter core, and
not only open-source emulators for that interpreter but an actual
compiler as well have been written to permit the P-code to be run on
platforms the games never originally graced. In fact, new games written
in this P-code are still being written. There is a home page at
`http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/', and it is even possible to play these
games in your browser (http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/) if it is
Java-capable.
Jargon File Version 4.3.1, 29 JUN 2001 =
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