Episode Details

Infocom fought software piracy with scratch and sniff cards, sold games in bookstores next to hardcover novels, turned down a $28 million buyout from Simon and Schuster, and then destroyed itself by building a business database. This deep dive follows the MIT academics who created Zork on a PDP-10 mainframe in 1977, found their first players through an unsecured ARPANET, and built a text-based empire that moved nearly 680,000 copies of the original trilogy.

We break down the technical genius of the Z-machine, which let Infocom write a game once and run it on the Apple II, Commodore 64, TRS-80, and IBM PC, and the natural language parser that made computers feel alive. We explore the feelies packed into boxes like Starcross and Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the tiered Invisiclues hint books with fake questions, and the Enchanter Easter egg that summoned the programmers. Then comes the collapse: envy of Lotus 1-2-3's $53 million year, the $495 Cornerstone database that shipped without scripting or natural language queries and sold 10,000 copies, the $7.5 million sale to Activision, and Bruce Davis dismantling everything that worked before shutting the division in 1989.

• Why Personal Software neglected Zork in favor of VisiCalc and how the founders bought back their inventory
• Hardware makers sending Infocom unreleased prototypes so their machines would launch with a game library
• 75 percent of players over 25 and an unusually high share of women, and the bookstore strategy that followed
• How feelies doubled as copy protection you could not pirate
• Pulling profitable backlist titles off shelves, the Fooblitzky failure, and the 2019 GitHub upload that preserved the source code