User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Fri Dec 02, 2016 1:03 pm

I love to research certain companies from the early days of computer gaming. And as I so often do, I regularly find myself winding my way down ancient, darkened tombs and labyrinthian corridors looking for traces of Infocom.

Almost all of the history from companies of this era (early-mid 80s) are gone without a digital trace. Thanks to the semi-permanence of paper, though, every now and then a few pieces crop up that I have to save and sock away for future use.

To that end, my little trove of "lost treasures" has slowly been growing into a fairly respectable collection - both of games and historical documents. More on that in the near future.

One of the things that is often missed about Interactive Fiction (a niche genre with a small but still very active community) is why so many of those games stick with us. Of course, in the mid-80s, most Infocom titles were frustratingly way over my head. Plus, I was continuously mesmerized by and obsessive over graphics; I always compared my home experiences to what I knew existed in the arcades. With the rise of the C64, Amiga and Nintendo NES, it's no surprise that the wide acceptance and popularity of text adventures was to be short lived in pop culture.

Infocom employee Dan Horn:
The reason that text adventure isn't alive anymore is that the technology to present visual representations of a story advanced very quickly. Some companies picked upon on that but you'd notice that the reality of gaming is now EverQuest -- massive multiplayer, real time, online, and graphically amazing. This is the market that Infocom was destined to own but let slip through their fingers because of bad business decisions. Imagine if you will Sorceror, Planetfall, and Deadline with the EverQuest engine, amazing... but lost forever.
It wasn't until many years later when games all became hyper-realistic and technological marvels (and many looked and felt the same just with different clothing) that the charm of text adventuring began to really reveal itself to me.

Infocom's efforts still contain compelling experiences for those willing to give them the time they require and deserve. When you read a book, then go watch the movie adaptation, 99% of the time the movie never beats your reading experience. The reason, of course, is because almost no movie can truly match the creativity that can exist in one's own mind. And while Infocom often became too obsessed with being painfully hard or obscure (not always, but it did turn off a lot of younger gamers) many of the stories and games are hard to match even when graphics and music abound. They got left behind technologically, but left an important mark in gaming history that is timeless and, today, tech agnostic.

For me, Lurking Horror (LH) is probably one of the finest examples of this, especially on the Amiga. It was the first (and only?) IF game that introduced short, creepy clips of ambient sounds to enhance the mood. When I first played it I was able to get my character to a particular part in the game where I was surrounded by people rhythmically chanting to an evil ritual. The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck started to rise. The only other game I'd ever played that ever got this close to scaring me was Resident Evil (the original) for Playstation. And that was more action horror, which is a bit of a different feeling. This was more like supernatural creepiness and dread, and it was a powerful and real emotion.

In any case, I hope you enjoy some of these ads I found below. They come from a report about Infocom I discovered on the MIT servers. The paper/presentation was written by six MIT students in 2000 as part of the requirements for the class - 6.933J: Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
We interviewed the company's founders and employees. We perused through the company's annual reports, newspaper articles, and meeting notes. We played their games. We got immersed in their interactive fiction.
An HTML version is still being hosted by MIT today, too.
Attachments
BrainAd1.jpg
Ad 2 - Brain ad

MatchWitsAd.jpg
Ad 1 - Hardware snark






Return to “The Lounge”