Infocom Memories

Jason Scott posted a set of scanned Infocom ads from the 1980 on his blog, ASCII, today.

Those of us old enough will probably remember at least a few of the ads he has posted.

Those not old enough might not know who Infocom was.

Infocom, if you didn’t bother to go to the link up in the first sentence, made a series of text-only adventure games in the 1980s starting with Zork, a game I purchased in the college bookstore for my Apple II in… the early 80s.

The games were a bit of an acquired taste.  You either liked them or you didn’t, but they were popular enough both by virtue of their cleverness and the fact that their simplicity allowed the games to be ported to a wide variety of operating environments.  Look at the list of supported computers in the lower right of that ad.  This was what we faced in the early 80s, back when Microsoft was mostly known for its BASIC compiler and its Flight Simulator.

I owned a pile of Infocom games over that decade, though the one I enjoyed the most was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Getting the Babel Fish was an event at least as memorable to me as killing Archaedas in Uldaman was.

So a big “Thank You!” goes out to Jason Scott for his ongoing effort to find and archieve things like these ads.