# Infocom

Back in the days when the average computer filled a large room, a game called Colossal Cave spread over Arpanet (the forerunner of the Internet), written by Will Crowther and independently updated by Don Woods. In this game, the player entered text phrases to move around a world of caverns and crawls, filled with treasures.

By 1977, this game had been played by a group of people at MIT, who decided that they could write something better. What they produced was the mainframe version of Zork (sometimes also known as Dungeon). This was the start of Infocom Inc., which between 1980 and 1989 released 35 text adventure games, or, as they preferred, Interactive Fiction titles. Infocom were one of the most prolific and certainly the most famous text adventure writing company, and many titles are still considered classics today.

Although the original Infocom is long gone, the name and the games are owned by Activision, Inc., who have reissued the games in several compilations: The Lost Treasures of Infocom, Volumes 1 and 2 and Masterpieces of Infocom. Both Activison's compilations and the original Infocom releases are still reasonably easy to come by on eBay, though, as they are collectable, they tend to fetch quite high prices.