by
Douglas Adams's inability to get out of the bath when copy deadlines
loom – “you can't fault him for personal hygiene in a
crisis” (Geoffrey Perkins) – and by 1987–9 meant
impossible collaborations with the British firm Magnetic Scrolls and
other intermediaries, whom the Implementors were unable to establish
working relationships with. Games by out-house employees got a little
further: though Berlyn's came to nothing, Blank wrote ‘Journey’
from California and newcomer Bob Bates designed ‘Sherlock’ and
‘Arthur’. (Bates worked from his notionally independent
company Challenge, but its finances were at that time heavily dependent
on advances from Infocom.) Without conscious decision, Infocom was
becoming a commissioning house rather than a workshop. The testing
department was involved so late on that the new management saw it as
largely an obstruction. Artistic collapse came in 1988, when four of the
six remaining creativefigures were fired or felt unable to go on (editor
John Prince, tester Liz Cyr-Jones, Implementors Jeff O'Neill and
Amy Briggs). Meretzky and Lebling remained, sometimes despondent, sometimes
cheerful, doing largely terrible work. The weekly game-design lunches
became at the last a charade, attended by random managers whom they
barely knew. Infocom never went bust as such, but by 1989 market conditions
would have obliged any management to salvage the Infocom brand-names while
abandoning text for largely graphical games. The company now called
Activision (following a second, happier merger) did just this with a
fresh generation of game designers in the 1990s. For all that they were
doing something quite different and thousands of miles away, many had
a keen sense of standing in an Infocom tradition. Activision's omnibus
1990s reissues of the Infocom text games achieved unexpectedly high
sales, to