Infocom is fondly remembered today as the studio responsible for a string of legendary text adventures including the Zork series, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and plenty more. Looking back, the company seems to have been confused about its own strengths, though. While it would be an exaggeration to say that its attempt to diversify into business software was the one thing that sunk Infocom, it sure did make a healthy contribution.
The software in question was Cornerstone, a database program released in 1985. Because Infocom’s text adventures had been designed to run on a virtual machine (called the Z-machine) it was easy to port them to different systems, so Cornerstone was likewise designed to run on its own virtual machine. Unfortunately, that made it notoriously slow to use, and the benefit of easy portability meant nothing since by that point IBM-compatibles had won the business sector of the platform war.
While dedicated Infocom heads have kept the Z-machine alive so you can play Infocom classics on your modern PC, nobody put much effort into the virtual machine Cornerstone ran on. Until now. Thanks to the tireless work of TaradinoC, you can download an interpreter called Linchpin that will run Infocom’s least-loved software. “It’s a new age for aficionados of failed 1985 database products!” as game developer Andrew Plotkin put it in his blog post about the project.
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Plotkin points to The Digital Antiquarian’s telling of the Cornerstone saga for more, which is a fascinating read. It makes the point that, since Infocom struggled to find external funding to develop its database app, money had to be diverted from projects in the game division including experiments with different genres, multiplayer, and “a cross-platform graphics system that would let them add pictures to their games”. At a time when back catalogue sales were drying up and Infocom needed splashy new releases, it was starved for the budget they demanded, and a year later had to merge with Activision to stay afloat.
Activision closed the studio down in 1989. It lives on in projects like TaradinoC’s, and thanks to Zork going open-source last year.
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