Incline Infocom design docs are now available at Internet Archive

[LESS T_T]

https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet

This is another magnificent effort from Jason Scott: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4834

Today, I’m dropping the first set of what I hope will be the vast majority of the stuff I scanned during that production year, onto the Internet Archive. The collection is called The Infocom Cabinet, and right now it has every design notebook/binder that Steve Meretzky kept during the period of what most people consider “Classic” Infocom. This includes binders for:

• Planetfall (1983) (Part 1, Part 2)
• Sorcerer (1984)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984)
• A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985)
• Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986)
• Stationfall (1987)
• Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz (1988)

Right there are nearly 4,000 pages of material to go through related to the production of these games.

 

[Infinitron]

Whoa. Somebody tell the Digital Antiquarian.

 

[Zed]

good player feedback on hitchhiker:

 

[MRY]

It would be great if Korgoth of Barbaria could read the A Mind Forever Voyaging design notes and post his reaction. They're a pretty funny window into a certain mindset. (My favorite is when "democracy" vs. "dictatorship" was rejected as a good/bad dyad on the theory that what you need for true justice is a benevolent despot because people don't know what's good for them.)

 

[LESS T_T]

More materials has been released, including docs on unreleased games and pitches (games based on The Abyss, Chainsaw Warrior, The Wizards of Oz, a sequel to Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and a space RPG inspired by Wizardy, Ultima and Rogue, etc.):

I’ve now dumped the balance of materials I have around into the Infocom Cabinetcollection on the Internet Archive. There’s some scatterings left on my hard drives, but they are either 100% personal (think: pay stubs and employee evaluations) or they’re duplicated in many ways in what did go up.

So with this little update comes:

• Pretty much all company-wide Infocom memos from 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 and 89
• Notes, sketches and scuttlework on a variety of Never-Made Infocom Games
• Notes by Steve Meretzky and others on Released Infocom Games
• A smattering of various Infocom documents, including logo sketches, org charts
• A “Core Sample” of Infocom Memos and notes I used for the documentary
• An utter mixed bag of graphics, pamphlets and documents, not all Infocom

All told, we’re somewhere in the range north of 5,000 individual scanned pages in this uploaded collection. It’s worth it to note that this wasn’t even the full extent of Steve Meretzky’s file cabinet – this was just as much as I grabbed with a sense of “this needs to be saved” cross-purposed with “this will look good scrolling by in the final film”. There’s likely piles of interesting material in the collection, including all of Steve’s work with Boffo and Legend Entertainment, two companies he worked at after Infocom – I just had to call it at some point, or I’d probably be scanning to this day. I again note that Stanford University was donated the entire Meretzky collection, where it sits safely to this day.

For the “what about” crowd… yes, there’s a few other items in the collection, and I may put them up if it makes sense to, but this should really be enough for anyone to produce a reasonably informed opinion on the goings-on, from nearly day one through to the office closing and all the remaining items shipped away, of Infocom, Inc., 1983-1989. They’re readable in the browser, and the original scans that are up are all 600dpi, meaning they can be zoomed in for artistic meaningfulness, which as a documentary film guy I’m pretty big on. It’s a triumph! People are talking about it! It’s making waves!

 

[Aeschylus]

This is spectacularly awesome. Anyone who is even remotely interested in video, or adventure game history should check this out.