Infocom

Infocom was an American video game company best known for its interactive fiction, a genre of text-based adventure games. It was founded in 1979 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling, with involvement from colleagues at MIT who had contributed to the early Zork series. The company grew into the leading publisher of high-quality text adventures during the early 1980s, combining engaging writing, intricate puzzle design, and innovative technology.

Infocom developed the Z-machine, a virtual machine designed to run their games on many computer platforms. This architecture allowed Infocom's titles to be ported across a wide range of systems while preserving a common game engine and data format. Their games were known for expressive parsers, atmospheric writing, and the use of feelies—physical items such as maps, letters, and trinkets included with the box to deepen immersion.

Key releases included the Zork trilogy and other original titles such as Planetfall, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (licensed from Douglas Adams), Enchanter, The Lurking Horror, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity, Bureaucracy, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. These games helped define the conventions of interactive fiction and influenced later adventure games and designers in the field.

In 1986 Infocom was acquired by Activision, and the Infocom label continued under that corporate umbrella for a time before winding down as a standalone studio in the late 1980s. The company's legacy rests in its innovations in natural-language processing for games and in creating a durable, platform-agnostic engine for interactive fiction.