Behind the scenes at Infocom (BBC, 1986) - UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration Discussion Forum

SiriusHardware · 27th Dec 2023, 6:16 pm

As some of you probably know Infocom were perhaps the greatest and best known exponents of the 'Text Adventure' game genre in their day. I've just noticed an interesting interview with Dave Lebling of Infocom in the BBC archives:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/text-a...-games/zrwvt39

I still have quite a collection of original boxed copies of Infocom games including the Enchanter / Sorcerer / Spellbreaker trilogy mentioned in the interview - in my case for the Atari ST, but they were available for just about anything which had a disc drive at one time or another.

As touched on in the interview the main game scripts are written in a common platform-agnostic language and are run via a platform specific interpreter, so if you have the script for any machine's version of a game you only need to add an interpreter for the hardware you want to run the game on and you're away. For example on the Linux platform for which I don't think Infocom ever produced native versions, there is the FROTZ interpreter for running Infocom game scripts on that platform.

27th Dec 2023, 6:16 pm	#1
SiriusHardware Dekatron Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: Newcastle, Tyne and Wear, UK. Posts: 11,603	Behind the scenes at Infocom (BBC, 1986) As some of you probably know Infocom were perhaps the greatest and best known exponents of the 'Text Adventure' game genre in their day. I've just noticed an interesting interview with Dave Lebling of Infocom in the BBC archives:- https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/text-a...-games/zrwvt39 I still have quite a collection of original boxed copies of Infocom games including the Enchanter / Sorcerer / Spellbreaker trilogy mentioned in the interview - in my case for the Atari ST, but they were available for just about anything which had a disc drive at one time or another. As touched on in the interview the main game scripts are written in a common platform-agnostic language and are run via a platform specific interpreter, so if you have the script for any machine's version of a game you only need to add an interpreter for the hardware you want to run the game on and you're away. For example on the Linux platform for which I don't think Infocom ever produced native versions, there is the FROTZ interpreter for running Infocom game scripts on that platform.