group of students, an improvised imitation
called ‘Zork’, led to the founding of Infocom, in June
1979, which at its height six years later employed a hundred people:
its mainframe, “a fleet of red refridgerators” (Brian
Moriarty), had the electricity bill you would expect “if you
were running an aluminum smelter” (Marc Blank). An engaging image,
but extensive testing and packaging were also critical in establishing
Infocom as a quality brand in a self-created niche market. Infocom's
glory years have been romanticised by talk of its free soda, aloha
shirts and the Tuesday lunchtime meetings of the
Implementors of games – of whom there were never more than ten, and who were by no
means as free to do whatever they liked as their image suggested.
Too little credit has been given to department heads who were at least
as responsiblefor Infocom's artistic texture, notably John Prince (book
editor, lunch host and low-key manager of the Implementors) and Liz
Cyr-Jones (chief of testing, and the only woman to substantially influence
the creative process). “The staff dresses casually, and it appears
as if some of them have slept in their clothes, if they have slept at
all…”, wrote Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe (6 May 1984),
the most perceptive and least wide-eyed of their many journalist visitors.
There was pain on the way, particularly in the discovery that games
were to be the only viable product of the former MIT Dynamic Modelling
Group, and not merely an interim line. Unsavoury corporate dealings after
a buyout by another ailing company, together with the Implementors'
own faltering belief in text as the medium and the exhaustion of key
members of staff, made