2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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Infocom
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. A now-legendary games company, active from 1979 to 1989, that
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commercialized the MDL parser technology used for Zork to produce a line of
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text adventure games that remain favorites among hackers. Infocom's games
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were intelligent, funny, witty, erudite, irreverent, challenging, satirical,
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and most thoroughly hackish in spirit. The physical game packages from
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Infocom are now prized collector's items. After being acquired by Activision
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in 1989 they did a few more modern (e.g. graphics-intensive) games which
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were less successful than reissues of their classics. The software,
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thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were written in a kind of P-code
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(called, actually, z-code ) and distributed with a P-code interpreter core,
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and not only open-source emulators for that interpreter but an actual
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compiler as well have been written to permit the P-code to be run on
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platforms the games never originally graced. In fact, new games written in
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this P-code are still being written. There is a home page at
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http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/ , and it is even possible to play these games
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in your browser if it is Java-capable.
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