infocom

1 definition found

infocom - Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) :

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