Infocom was founded by people who were not sure they wanted to make games. In 1979 a group from MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science set up a company to sell software, of a kind nobody had yet decided. The one thing they had ready was Zork, an adventure several of them had written for fun on the laboratory’s PDP-10, so they sold that. It made Infocom the most admired name in text adventures, with games that understood whole sentences, told jokes, and came in boxes stuffed with props. The founders still wanted to be a business software company, and the database they built to become one nearly sank them.
Fast facts
- Founded: 22 June 1979 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by ten members of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science.
- First game: Zork, released in parts from 1980.
- Technology: the Z-machine, a virtual machine with an interpreter for each computer.
- Writers: Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Steve Meretzky, Stu Galley, Brian Moriarty and, with Meretzky, Douglas Adams.
- Business software: Cornerstone, a $495 database, 1985.
- Owner from 1986: Activision, which closed the Cambridge studio in 1989 and kept Infocom as a label.
From the laboratory
Zork began at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science in the late 1970s. Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling wrote it for the laboratory’s PDP-10, inspired by the original Adventure, and it grew until it strained “even the megabyte address space of that machine”, Lebling wrote in BYTE in December 1980. What set it apart was the parser. It knew over 600 words and could make sense of “Put all of the books but the green one under the rug”.
Al Vezza, a professor at the laboratory, encouraged the group to form a company. Computer Gaming World dated Infocom’s founding to 22 June 1979, and Retro Gamer’s history of the company names ten founders, each of whom put in between $400 and $2,000: Tim Anderson, Joel Berez, Marc Blank, Mike Broos, Scott Cutler, Stu Galley, Dave Lebling, J. C. R. Licklider, Chris Reeve and Al Vezza. Nobody worked for it full-time at first, and its office was a post-office box.
Zork on a microcomputer
A mainframe program of a megabyte would not fit a home computer with 32K. Infocom’s answer had two parts. The first was to cut Zork into three games. The second was a virtual machine: the game was compiled once for an imaginary computer, and each real computer needed only a small interpreter to run it. Lebling described this “Zork-language virtual machine” in BYTE in December 1980, when interpreters existed for the Apple II, PDP-11, PDP-10 and TRS-80. It is now called the Z-machine. Moving an object from one room to another took a single three-byte instruction, and the text was stored compressed.
Personal Software, the publisher of VisiCalc, distributed Zork I from late 1980. Retro Gamer says Infocom disliked its box, which made the game look like a sword fight, bought back the unsold stock and began publishing Zork itself in October 1981, with Zork II a month later. Because every game ran on the same virtual machine, each new Infocom title could come out on almost every computer at once.
The games and their boxes
After Zork came detective stories, science fiction and comedy:
| Game | Year | Author |
|---|---|---|
| Zork I | 1980 | Dave Lebling, Marc Blank |
| Deadline | 1982 | Marc Blank |
| Planetfall | 1983 | Steve Meretzky |
| The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | 1984 | Douglas Adams, Steve Meretzky |
| Wishbringer | 1985 | Brian Moriarty |
| Spellbreaker | 1985 | Dave Lebling |
| Trinity | 1986 | Brian Moriarty |
| Beyond Zork | 1987 | Brian Moriarty |
Deadline, a murder mystery, started a habit. There was not room in the game for all the evidence, so Blank had the clues made as real objects: the box held photographs, interrogation reports, a lab analysis and pills “found near to the body”. Infocom’s extras became known as feelies, and they helped to deter piracy as well. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came with peril-sensitive sunglasses, a microscopic space fleet and some fluff; Leather Goddesses of Phobos with a scratch-and-sniff card; Wishbringer with a stone that glowed in the dark. Retro Gamer reports that by 1984 Infocom was spending about $60,000 on the packaging of each game.
Games grew bigger as the machines did: in 1986 Amtix called A Mind Forever Voyaging “Infocom’s biggest game to date”. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the company’s biggest commercial success since Zork. Douglas Adams was already a fan, and Meretzky worked with him, Adams in London and Meretzky in Massachusetts, on two DEC System 20 computers linked over a network. Players who got stuck could buy InvisiClues, hint books printed in invisible ink that a special pen revealed one answer at a time.
The Cornerstone gamble
The games made money: Retro Gamer puts Infocom’s sales at more than $6 million in 1983 and $10 million in 1984. The founders wanted more. Computer Gaming World wrote in 1991 that many of them “did not even like personal computers” and hoped to “make it big” like their MIT friends who had founded Lotus: “Vezza was determined to out-Lotus Lotus.” In October 1982 Infocom set up a business products division.
Its product was Cornerstone, a relational database for people who were not programmers, built on the same virtual-machine idea as the games. It came out at the start of 1985 at $495. 80 Micro’s columnist, back from the Comdex trade show, thought the launch had been helped by the company’s reputation:
Cornerstone, their first business package, received much favorable attention. The primary reason was not so much the product itself, but because people feel good about Infocom.
Goodwill was not enough. The virtual machine made Cornerstone slow on large databases, and users could not program it. Retro Gamer reports that it cost $2.5 million to develop and brought in $1.8 million. Infocom closed the business division, cut the price to $99.95 and laid off staff, and its game sales, $10 million in 1985, had stopped growing.
Activision
In 1986 Activision bought the weakened company. Its chief executive, Jim Levy, was, in Computer Gaming World’s words, “a true fan of Infocom games”. The deal was finalised on 19 February 1986, for $7.5 million, much of it in Activision stock, with the final payment on 13 June.
Levy was soon replaced by Bruce Davis, and Infocom’s staff came to feel, as Computer Gaming World put it, that he was pushing the costs of Activision’s unwanted projects onto their budget. Activision took over Infocom’s sales and manufacturing, then its public relations and customer support. Infocom tried pictures: Beyond Zork (1987) added an on-screen map and role-playing statistics, and Zork Zero (1988) had full-colour graphics.
In Britain, Activision had already been Infocom’s distributor. 8000 Plus reported in November 1986 that 22 Infocom adventures were available “through its UK distributors Activision”. By 1989 British magazines were watching the company closely. “Infocom spotting is a worthwhile pastime because it gives us some idea of the state of the fantasy market in the US,” ACE wrote in May 1989. “Right now, the signs are not encouraging.” Infocom had released several new games in 1987 and “published almost nothing since”.
That month, Retro Gamer reports, Activision (by then renamed Mediagenic) laid off 15 of Infocom’s 26 remaining staff and asked the rest to move to its headquarters in California. Five agreed. Computer Gaming World summed up what was left: development moved to the West Coast in 1989, and by the time Arthur, Journey and Shogun reached the shops, “Infocom was no longer a distinctive publisher, it was only a label”. ACE, reporting Mediagenic’s own troubles in October 1990, said the company had spent millions buying “prestigious adventure developer Infocom, only to close it down earlier this year”.
After Cambridge
Activision kept the name and the games. It sold the old adventures in compilations such as The Lost Treasures of Infocom, advertised in two volumes in 1992, and revived the Zork world with graphics and filmed actors in Return to Zork (1993). Players kept the text games alive too. In the 1990s Graham Nelson wrote Inform, a language that compiles new games for the Z-machine.
Activision became part of Microsoft in 2023. On 20 November 2025 Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office, Team Xbox and Activision released the source code of Zork I, II and III under the MIT licence, adding it to repositories that the archivist Jason Scott had kept.
Sources
- P. David Lebling, “Zork and the Future of Computerized Fantasy Simulations”, BYTE vol. 5 no. 12, December 1980, pp. 172 onward: Zork’s authors and parser; the Zork-language virtual machine and its interpreters.
- 80 Micro, February 1985, p. 8: Comdex column on Cornerstone and Infocom. March 1985, p. 120: Cornerstone ($495), a relational database for non-programmers.
- Amtix! issue 10, August 1986, p. 55: A Mind Forever Voyaging as “Infocom’s biggest game to date”.
- 8000 Plus issue 2, November 1986: Infocom’s adventures in Britain, distributed by Activision.
- ACE issue 20, May 1989: adventure column on Infocom.
- ACE issue 37, October 1990: “Aloha Activision” (Mediagenic’s losses; the closure of Infocom).
- Computer Gaming World issue 88, November 1991: history of Infocom (the founding date; the founders and Lotus; Cornerstone; Jim Levy; the purchase and its dates; the dismantling; “only a label”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 101, December 1992: mail-order advertisement listing Lost Treasures of Infocom and Lost Treasures of Infocom 2.
- “From Zork to Zero: The Infocom Story”, Retro Gamer issue 10, 2004: the founders and their stakes; Personal Software; the Z-machine interpreters; Deadline and the packaging; InvisiClues; Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky; sales figures; the business division and Cornerstone’s costs; Bruce Davis; the 1989 layoffs; the list of games.
- Computer Gaming World issue 114, January 1994: Return to Zork.
- Edge issue 142, November 2004: Inform and Graham Nelson.
- Microsoft Open Source Blog, “Preserving code that shaped generations: Zork I, II, and III go Open Source”, 20 November 2025 (web, secondary). https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/20/preserving-code-that-shaped-generations-zork-i-ii-and-iii-go-open-source/