the winding-down of 1988–9 unnecessarily
dispiriting. But former hands mostly look back on the heyday as a happy,
one-time thing, like a summer romance.

Infocom was dominant for a period in the higher-end,
chiefly American market: in 1985 it always occupied several of the top
twenty positions in the SoftSel Hot List – industry-wide sales
charts run by a major US distributor – and one game held the
number one slot for nine months. But the company was not nearly so
visible outside the USA, where disc drives were less affordable, and
in any case had no monopoly on the basic idea. “The ‘adventure
boom’ is on – witness the rash of new programs, books and
even a specialist magazine.”3 Although many were short-lived
in what was something of a cottage industry, Hans Persson's catalogue
cites 329 production companies. For instance,in the UK, Acornsoft made
an early start: based in Cambridge and with close links to the university,
it had a ready-made supply of adventure designs and quickly released
reworkings of the Phoenix mainframe games for the BBC Micro –
Acorn's computer, but built to spearhead a national computer literacy
campaign supported by television programmes. Some of Acornsoft's titles
made tidy business (one of its authors earned royalties of around
£35,000 on games originally written with no thought of profit), but
in the end a market limited to a single model of microcomputer was
insufficient to support a large games company.

Looking back at the early microcomputers is like looking
at the fossils in ancient shale, before evolution took out three quarters
of the species, some of them weirder than anything living today. The
market had been entered by Apple, Commodore,