Lost Infocom Games Discovered

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Archivists at Waxy.org have gotten a copy of the backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989 and are piecing together information about games that were never released. In particular, there is the sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy called Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and there are two playable prototypes of it. And yes, they have playable downloads available."

hard drive archeology

what I liked about reading this, was the "archeology" of piecing together the behind the scenes - and comments from some of the actual persons involved - reads like a USENET thread - be sure to put on your flame retardant eyewear ;)

The submitter says it all...

Submitter's name: "I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property"

Summary of summary: Some people got ahold of someone's hard drive and published the contents online.

Yeah.

Re:The submitter says it all...

Dude. The data was in a dark place. It was likely to be eaten by a grue.

Just don't!

Now all you have to do is not panic if these pages get slashdotted... just... DON'T... PANIC.

Re:Just don't!

It won't get slashdotted, it'll get eaten by 69105 grues.

Nostalgia!

I think this is pretty cool, whether the games are good or not it is always interesting to see the ones that didn't make it to market for one reason or another.

Infocom was a damn good company

They botched up on the database, letting themselves be bought out was suicidal, and the "graphics" on Beyond Zork constituted intellectual genocide, but the quality of their imagination was staggeringly good. The descriptions bested anything Level 9 could do and the puzzles were supremely elegant. Scott Adams' adventures - the third major series of the time - paled into insignificance. And if Infocom was the Manchester United of computer games at the time, competitors like Acorn and Melbourne House were the Subbutio.

With this discovery and restoration of such ancient treasures, it would be nice to think that the interest would spur some sort of reunion and one last game "for memory's sake". Actually, although I rank them second, I'd love to see that with Level 9 as well. It won't happen, although I guess Infocom fans ("Infocommies" according to the New Zork Times) could have a crack at writing an Infocom-like game for their interpreter.

Re:Infocom was a damn good company

That's actually already happened, in a way. After Infocom went out of business the fan community reverse-engineered their VM (the Z-Machine [wikipedia.org]) and Graham Nelson designed a new language and compiler for it (Inform [inform-fiction.org]). That, along with other interactive fiction languages/toolkits that compile to their own VMs (TADS [tads.org], Hugo [generalcoffee.com], AGT, ALAN, and many more) and a small but dedicated community has ensured that interactive fiction hasn't died out.

Every year dozens of new games come out, usually for the two major annual competitions (the IF Comp [ifcomp.org] and the Spring Thing [springthing.net]). Most of them are shorter than "commercial-era" games, mainly because they're written by hobbyists who don't have the time and resources to commit to building large games. They run the gamut from puzzle-focused games in the style of Infocom to story-focused games that eschew large numbers of elaborate puzzles to focus on story, and there are also more experimental and artistic games that try to push the medium in new directions. The IF Archive [ifarchive.org] has an extensive collection of these games, and there are several [tads.org] review [wurb.com] sites [ifreviews.org] that attempt to catalog and organize the archive. The IF community has long had rec.arts.int-fiction [google.com] and rec.games.int-fiction [google.com] at their center, though with the rise of blogs and web forums it has started to fragment some.

Re:Infocom was a damn good company

I just want to add a small detail to this. If you are *at all* interested in literate programming, you have to check out Inform 7. To say they've pushed some boundaries is an understatement. It's one of the most innovative things I've seen in years. So even if IF isn't your bag, take a look.

And now writing the games is a game...

After Infocom went out of business the fan community reverse-engineered their VM (the Z-Machine) and Graham Nelson designed a new language and compiler for it (Inform).

This is fascinating not just for Infocom fans, but also for programmers. For example:

The Deathbot Assembly Line is a room. "Here is the heart of the whole operation, where your opponents are assembled fresh from scrap metal and bits of old car." The dangerous robot is a thing in the Assembly Line. "One dangerous robot looks ready to take you on!" A robotic head, a drill arm, a needle arm, a crushing leg and a kicking leg are parts of the dangerous robot.

That's source code. Inform 7 has been out for a couple years, and I've been working intimately with it for most of that time, but I'm still impressed.

Re:And now writing the games is a game...

Think about it--Inform 7 code has just as much arbitrary grammar as Inform 6 (or any 'classic' programming language) did, and is only marginally faster to read if you're not familiar with Inform 6 code.

True, the syntax is arbitrary either way, but what really sets I7 apart is how you can express certain concepts, which tend to show up over and over again in interactive fiction, in a way that's more natural than writing loops and conditions. Those concepts are rules governing behavior, relationships between objects, and descriptions of sets of objects.

Here's an example of all three:

After printing the name of a person who attends an accredited university, say ", Ph.D".

This is a rule about what to do in a certain situation: aspect-oriented programming, essentially. Here the situation involves an activity (printing the name) and the object which is the subject of the activity (any person who matches the description).

"A person who attends an accredited university" is an object description, which can be used in various ways as a condition -- does object X match the description? -- or as an iterator: show me all the matching objects. Here, "person" and "university" are kinds of object (classes) and "accredited" is an either-or property (a boolean flag).

"Attends" is a relation that expresses the link between a student and his school. Here it's being used as part of a description, but it can also be used in a condition ("if the player attends Harvard") or changed at runtime ("now the player attends MIT;").

These concepts can all be expressed in Inform 6 or any other OOP language, using properties, methods, loops, etc. But making them fundamental parts of the language gives them a whole new life.

Re:And now writing the games is a game...

Now, obviously Infocom did some pretty amazing things with Inform (1-5?) and Inform 6, before Inform 7 came out.

Actually, Infocom used their own language called ZIL, which looked a lot like LISP with angle brackets. Inform was created in the 90s after Infocom's virtual machine had been reverse engineered.

But now I'm curious (as a programmer unfamiliar with either environment outside of this /. thread!), what would have been the "Inform 6" way of constructing the "source code"?

Something like this:

Object assembly_line "Deathbot Assembly Line"
    with description "Here is the heart of the whole operation, where your opponents are assembled fresh from scrap metal and bits of old car.",
    has light;

Object -> dangerous_robot "dangerous robot"
    with name 'dangerous' 'robot',
              description "One dangerous robot looks ready to take you on!";

Object -> -> robot_head "robotic head" with name 'robotic' 'head';
Object -> -> drill_arm "drill arm" with name 'drill' 'arm';
Object -> -> needle_arm "needle arm" with name 'needle' 'arm';
Object -> -> crushing_leg "crushing leg" with name 'crushing' 'leg';
Object -> -> kicking_leg "kicking leg" with name 'kicking' 'leg';

Nostalgia

I was in fourth grade when I first played with the Zork triology of text-adventure games on the C-64. An innocent kid and budding geek, I tried feeding novel combinations of nouns and verbs to the primitive parser.

I tried "EAT LAMP"... got back "You can't eat the lamp."
"EAT BREAD"... "That was delicious."... Etc.

I tried "EAT ME". I couldn't comprehend why my dad, who had just bought the game for me and was supervising over my shoulder, started laughing so hard.

Several years later I finally understood why he laughed even harder when the computer responded:

"Auto-cannibalism is not the answer."

You can mod this offtopic, but those 1983 game designers had a real sense of humor and subtly implemented it in 64KB.

... Oh, you don't like it when I recycle old jokes [slashdot.org]!? You must be new here...

Zork knows me better than I do

>look
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

>kill mailbox with hands
I've known strange people, but fighting a small mailbox?

>

He shouldn't have done that

IMO, he shouldn't have published the emails, particularly without attempting to contact the authors. That's rude and, as can be seen from the comments on his blog, dredges up hard feelings that would best remain private.

In fact, he probably shouldn't have published the code and game files, either. Those data are not his. He has no right to do with it as he sees fit. Someone "gave" that drive to him, but that may not have been theirs to give. Truthfully, I have less of a problem with that, as no one likely really cares about the games themselves. But, its still an issue.

At any rate, I think he's hiding behind "journalism" to simply publish some juicy talk associated with a formerly popular defunct games publisher.

RTFA - you wont regret it!

Wow. What a blast from the past! Sometimes, good things can result from wrongs (which arguably Baio's publishing of the emails was). The historical value of this stuff is undisputed. However the truly brilliant bits are the responses to the blog itself, especially from those actually involved.

There has never been a Slashdot submission where reading TFA was a greater pleasure.

The Original Hitchhiker's Game Online

... can be found here [bbc.co.uk]. I never did get through that sulky door. Now I can relive the aggravation all over again.

Re:Infocom was never the same

It is almost like they lost the will to make games.

That is more or less what happened. In 1984, InfoCom tried to "serious up" with the Cornerstone database. Unfortunately, it was not well received and kind of dragged the company down:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom#Cornerstone [wikipedia.org]

Also by 1986, gamers were fascinated with cool graphics and sounds that pushed the envelope of their C64s, as well as this interesting new console called the "Nintendo Entertainment System" with its distinctly unique brand of games. There wasn't a whole lot of room in the market for text adventures anymore. With their resources spread out and depleted, "loosing their will" was probably an apt description.

Re:Infocom was never the same

Also by 1986, gamers were fascinated with cool graphics and sounds that pushed the envelope of their C64s, as well as this interesting new console called the "Nintendo Entertainment System" with its distinctly unique brand of games. There wasn't a whole lot of room in the market for text adventures anymore.

In the UK at least, Magnetic Scrolls' first text adventure, "The Pawn" was still a big deal at that time. Sure, the pretty graphics (at least on the 16-bit versions) were a selling point, but the parser was the other major aspect that got peoples' attention. (Though I read at least one dissenting review attacking it for trying to be clever at the expense of usability/predictability, as well as calling the game generally overhyped and illogical.)

But my point is that- at least here- there was still a notable market (and public attention) for text adventures at the time, arguably revitalised by Magnetic Scrolls' success and innovations deriving from their games' origins on the newer 16/32-bit machines. Perhaps Infocom were on the back foot in the face of this newcomer, or perhaps the US market lost its appetite for adventures faster than the UK did.

I'd say that the genre finally lost steam here around the turn of the decade. Coincidentally(?) that's around the same time that Infocom's then-owners Activision finally pulled the plug on the company (the name and IP were reused during the 1990s, but the "true" Infocom effectively died then).

Re:Strange Description...

He cloned himself in a tragic accident involving an improbability generator, an elastic band and a Rezrov scroll.

Re:Educational value:

I'll use this in class to point out the importance of good backup strategies.

Yep, it's amazing that the stuff still survives... as compared to source material that has now been lost forever.

I wish Origin had had a Massive Unix Server for source control and whatnot. But they didn't have one.

And security: this data should not have left the company.

Agreed on a general principle - but if the company's IP has long since ceased to be profitable and its material is mostly just of great historical interest, the situation is quite different. It's a typical human reaction - It's easy to say "you can't have this", only thinking at the usual every-day rules, not thinking of the historical significance, condemning a lot of researchers, years hence, to look for scraps of information and hunt for hazy recollections... Yeah, it'd easy to be in Activision's pants and say "Yes, there is a chance this property is profitable and we'll get to making the Hitchhiker sequel eventually" without batting an eye, but let's face it, IF is dead as a commercial art form =)

Re:Educational value:

It wasn't really a backup drive. They actually put the file in the Thing That Your Aunt Gave You That You Don't Know What It Is and lost it, but it just turned up again.

Re:Educational value:

I disagree. Security can always be broken. Good corporate security means keeping data safe until its release can no longer cause financial loss to the company. Since this data has remained private until two decades after the company died, I think it is a good example of adequate data security.

Re:Educational value:

I'll use this in class to point out the importance of good backup strategies. And security: this data should not have left the company.

Riiiight... Because this doesn't make a perfect example of why such information can do the world good, long after a company has ceased to exist as a viable market presence.

You might want to gloss that bit over in class. "Remember, protect everything, because your company will always sit at the top of the niche-X market, will never go bankrupt, and no one will ever care about your work long after the fact".


Personally, I consider the rarity of amazing find like this, further proof of the absurdity of existing copyright law. Copyright exists to grant a limited monopoly on creative works, rather than making them vanish into obscurity (deliberately, as with the BBC's pre-1970 archive purge, or not, as with all nitrate and acetate film ever made).

We need copyright to expire early enough that society can preseve both the released form and any historically-interesting raw materials (ie, source code). Not only that, I would go further, to say that we need to require the eventual release of such raw materials, for the grant of copyright in the first place.

Re:It's not going to have any value.

Do I want people seeing code I wrote that long ago? Well, not too long ago I found the complete source code for fMSX Amiga, which occupied my time for about 6 years, starting around 1994 - so that's 14 years ago now.

Browsing through that code, I find it to be far more readable, and far more elegant than anything I have done since (quite surprising really, since this is a mixture of C, C++, and 68K assembly). It helps that it is a relatively small project (only 44K lines in the final version), and that I was doing it for myself, so I could spend the time to make it right. Everything since then was for work (and thus under a deadline), and involved much larger bodies of code.

So would I mind people seeing it today? Hell no, I'm proud of my work.

There is of course the separate question of seeing private emails from that time published. That is something I wouldn't appreciate, and unfortunately something that seems to have happened here.