Infocom had a long and storied history in the formative years of the video game industry running all the way back to 1980. Thanks to the efforts of one Jason Scott and industry legend and former Infocom employee, Steve Meretzky, a hefty chunk of that history is now available to view online.
Jason Scott keeps a blog in which he detailed his interactions with Steve Meretzky. Scott met with Meretzky in an interview for Scott’s interactive fiction documentary, GET LAMP, during which Scott discovered that Meretzky had kept a treasure trove of notes, memos, designs, and binders upon binders of material detailing the life of the Infocom brand before it was eventually bought out and absorbed by Activision. Scott was allowed to make high-res scans of a lot of the materials to use for his project and is now in the process of offering all of his scans for public viewing on Internet Archive.
In the process of scanning, Scott has been able to make the following information available as it pertains to related games:
In addition to these game specific archives, there are other archives featuring business practice, execution, and data collection of the company such as sales data and ads and marketing.
In a time where its becoming increasingly important to preserve the history of the video game industry, this is truly a video game historian’s paradise of a collection. Scott intends to continue uploading to this archive until he’s finally uploaded everything he has, so anyone interested will be able to view one of the cornerstones of the old school video game industry as it lived and died.
