Wednesday, April 17, 2019

For historians of the birth of computer games

Here's a pretty amazing resource:

  • The Infocom Cabinet: Binders and Folders of Infocom, Inc. (1981-1987)
    In 2006, documentary filmmaker Jason Scott began production on GET LAMP, a video documentary about the realm of text adventures and interactive fiction. Shooting and research time was roughly 4 years, during which Jason interacted with a large variety of members of the various communities and companies that made up the story of text adventures. Among these was Steve Meretzky, developer at Infocom, Inc, arguably the largest and most influential of the 1980s adventure game companies.

    During his time at Infocom, Steve Meretzky meticulously gathered thousands of pages of notes, journals, maps, memos, forms and other printable materials related to all aspects of Infocom, and kept them in his basement for decades. During the GET LAMP production, Jason Scott scanned in roughly 9,000 pages of these documents across a number of months, borrowing the materials from Steve and scanning them as quickly as possible, at around 600dpi. From these scans, a portion was used in the GET LAMP movie to illustrate various scenes and descriptions by interviewees.

  • Historical Source
    A collection of historical source files, for education and perusal.
  • Source Code For A Ton Of Classic Infocom Games Appears
    A generous benefactor has very kindly offered retro fans and the wider internet a glorious gift this morning: a dump of source code from classic Infocom text games, including the original Zork adventures, Shogun, and Infocom's adaptation of the legendary Douglas Adams novel, Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

Now, about those other 16 hours per day that I requested in order to study all this...

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