The Infocom Cabinet: Explore Text Adventure History
Thousands of pages of history!
If you enjoy digging through video game history, documents, and artefacts, you'll want to have a poke around the archives of Steve Meretzky. Back in the '80s he worked at Infocom, the interactive fiction specialists behind dozens of classics and curious including Zork, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Meretzky sure collected an awful lot of stuff over the years. A few years back, he let the chap behind the GET LAMP documentary rummage and scan things, and now Jason Scott has uploaded literally thousands of pages of design notebooks, letters, sales data, photos, and more as The Infocom Cabinet. That's not even it all.
Jason Scott explains:
"I scanned as much as I could, and after working on Steve's 'design binders', which are very large combinations of every scrap of paper related to a game, I took a run at the file cabinet, which had pretty much every major communicated aspect of the Infocom company, from memorandums and business process through to interoffice softball game preparations and crab race outcomes. I definitely didn’t get everything, but I got a whole lot. Something on the order of roughly 9,000 scanned items, in fact."
He's far from finished uploading, mind, but for now The Infocom Cabinet "has every design notebook/binder that Steve Meretzky kept during the period of what most people consider 'Classic' Infocom." That's Planetfall, Sorcerer, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall, and Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz. Plus a load of photos and business documents. Scott hopes to share most of the other 5000-odd pages online too.
Go on, get stuck in!