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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 freeware 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 bering
written. (Emulators that can run Infocom game ZIPs, and new games,
are available at
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu:/doc/misc/if-archive/infocom.)
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