Infocom

1 definition found

From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:

  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 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 (http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/) if it is
     Java-capable.