Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc (2000) [pdf]
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Re: Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc (2000) [pdf]
#2You can play a lot of the old Infocom text adventures here:
http://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/
I highly recommend Planetfall.
(warning: Requires a somewhat-sketchy-seeming-but-harmless-i-think Java applet. Chrome gives you a hard time about it, but if you create an exception for the site in the java control panel (on OS X: settings->Java->security), then you can play it in Safari)
Re: Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc (2000) [pdf]
#3Cornerstone was a great tool, sigh.
Re: Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc (2000) [pdf]
#4You can play a lot of the old Infocom text adventures here: http://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/ I highly recommend Planetfall. (warning: Requires a somewhat-sketchy-seeming-but-harmless-i-think Java applet. Chrome gives you a hard time about it, but if you create an exception for the site in the java control panel (on OS X: settings->Java->security), then you can play it in Safari)
It's also not that hard to get your hands on the Z-Code files of Infocom games and run them in a Z-Code interpreter. (Note, however, that they are still under copyright. Also, for some games, you'll also need a copy of the original docs or other material from the packaging as Infocom sometimes used info in the docs, decoder wheels, etc. as a low-grade anti-piracy technique.)
Agree that Planetfall is one of the better ones. Steve Meretzky also wrote A Mind Forever Voyaging which I really enjoyed although it's somewhat atypical of Infocom games in a few ways.
Re: Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc (2000) [pdf]
#5http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/infocom/csdemo/index.h... has screenshots and a downloadable copy of the 'infamous' Cornerstone database that Infocom built.
It looks quality for the era it was built in.
Re: Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc (2000) [pdf]
#6Cornerstone was a great tool, sigh.
>"Cornerstone is the best program I have ever used"
Sounds like everything they built was really good. Read the piece, but still hard to piece together why they failed.
Re: Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc (2000) [pdf]
#7You can play a lot of the old Infocom text adventures here: http://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/ I highly recommend Planetfall. (warning: Requires a somewhat-sketchy-seeming-but-harmless-i-think Java applet. Chrome gives you a hard time about it, but if you create an exception for the site in the java control panel (on OS X: settings->Java->security), then you can play it in Safari)
It's also not that hard to get your hands on the Z-Code files of Infocom games and run them in a Z-Code interpreter. (Note, however, that they are still under copyright. Also, for some games, you'll also need a copy of the original docs or other material from the packaging as Infocom sometimes used info in the docs, decoder wheels, etc. as a low-grade anti-piracy technique.) Agree that Planetfall is one of the better…
and you'll find z-code interpreters for pretty much any device you can think of. I like in particular Gargoyle [1][2] which stands out as the only one with great font rendering/typography.
One of the coolest/ridiculous things about infocom games were the feelies [3] (a term they coined) There is a great collection [4] of photographs of all the packages and extras, some of which were including necessary clues to solve the games.
[1] http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/ [2] https://github.com/garglk/garglk [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feelie [4] http://gallery.guetech.org/
Re: Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc (2000) [pdf]
#8You can play a lot of the old Infocom text adventures here: http://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/ I highly recommend Planetfall. (warning: Requires a somewhat-sketchy-seeming-but-harmless-i-think Java applet. Chrome gives you a hard time about it, but if you create an exception for the site in the java control panel (on OS X: settings->Java->security), then you can play it in Safari)
It's also not that hard to get your hands on the Z-Code files of Infocom games and run them in a Z-Code interpreter. (Note, however, that they are still under copyright. Also, for some games, you'll also need a copy of the original docs or other material from the packaging as Infocom sometimes used info in the docs, decoder wheels, etc. as a low-grade anti-piracy technique.) Agree that Planetfall is one of the better…
I grabbed a copy of ztools and put them in github here, surprisingly they compile on a modern day Debian system without any change,
https://github.com/ecliptik/ztools
Here's a short blog post I wrote on de-compiling interactive fiction using them,
Re: Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc (2000) [pdf]
#9You can play a lot of the old Infocom text adventures here: http://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/ I highly recommend Planetfall. (warning: Requires a somewhat-sketchy-seeming-but-harmless-i-think Java applet. Chrome gives you a hard time about it, but if you create an exception for the site in the java control panel (on OS X: settings->Java->security), then you can play it in Safari)
It's also not that hard to get your hands on the Z-Code files of Infocom games and run them in a Z-Code interpreter. (Note, however, that they are still under copyright. Also, for some games, you'll also need a copy of the original docs or other material from the packaging as Infocom sometimes used info in the docs, decoder wheels, etc. as a low-grade anti-piracy technique.) Agree that Planetfall is one of the better…
There are any number of free text adventure games built using Z-Code or Glulx systems (or newer alternatives, like Twine) that you can play online:
Re: Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc (2000) [pdf]
#10Cornerstone was a great tool, sigh.
>"Cornerstone is the best program I have ever used" Sounds like everything they built was really good. Read the piece, but still hard to piece together why they failed.
Essentially Cornerstone. They made large investments in developing, marketing, and selling it and it basically flopped although it had a variety of innovative features from a technology perspective.
Arguably they were also slow to branch beyond pure text adventure games but the investments in business software were the bigger near-term problem.