infocom

(The Z-machine is the virtual machine invented by Infocom for running text adventure games.

A number of the Infocom games required the use of various objects/information included in the game box such as decoder wheels.

I'm surely not the hardware-hack as most guys around these realms, but I do sure love Infocom and the old textadventures and… you didn't really build a Infocom-CPU, did you?

Still, a few people have said it reminds them of the old Infocom games, which I think is pretty cool.

I went to school with a bunch of the Infocom guys and was an unofficial beta tester for them at one point.

Until I can find my old Infocom Masterpieces CD, which free-to-play IF should I use to introduce my 10-yr-old son to the genre?

Modern IF games rely much less on tricks and traps like the classic Infocom games of days past, so they're much more friendly and entertaining to play.

It's possible that it would still be too fiddly for you, but modern parser-based text adventures have gotten a lot better since the Infocom days in this way.

That was typical of Infocom games, though.

The developers went on to start Infocom and split Zork into three parts that were small enough to run on home computers, creating ZIL and the Z-machine in the process.

These days things are somewhat better with Siri and Wolfram and the like, but back then the best you had - especially in games - were the Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls adventure systems.

On the subject of IF, programming language geeks should all check out Inform 7 - Graham Nelson's programming tool for creating text-based games that run on the Infocom Z-machine (and other related formats).

How do you consider Infocom and Sierra to be "indie"?

Infocom used it in their ads with the general theme of "We're more serious and important than mere videogames." The term has been tussled back and forth over the years; these days it's more of an umbrella term than a niche.

I'd guess more 1KiB, although I don't know this architecture (my "Infocom" experience is mostly with original Zork running on MIT-DM, a KA10 PDP-10, using a general purpose MDL language, although I only looked at code, didn't try to write any).

Infocom and co have proven that 3 decades ago...

I found the recent series by the Digital Antiquarian to be very interesting on this, weaving together Infocom's Trinity series and the atomic bomb history, including the Tsar Bomba.

Sierra, LucasArts, Infocom, Origin, Broderbund, Commodore, Atari...