The gavel has fallen; the cup has been stomped; pick your metaphor. Microsoft has succeeded in its almost-two-year quest to gobble up Activision.
The peculiar side effect in my corner of the world is that Microsoft now owns the dusty remains of Infocom. Microsoft owns all the classic Infocom games (except maybe Hitchhiker and Shogun). They own the rights to sell the games. They own the rights to make more Zork spinoffs.
Of course, from a corporate point of view, this means exactly nothing. Activision has kept a few Infocom games up on GOG. For a while they sold them for iOS, but that was too much work so they stopped. In 2009 they flirted with a casual Zork tie-in that went nowhere. None of this rates even a footnote in the Microsoft acquisition prospectus, which I imagine is six hundred pages of Candy Crush stats with an appendix mentioning WoW and CoD as “also nice to have”.
But of course I’m interested in the Zork stuff. Let’s follow the bouncing brogmoid!
- 1979: Infocom is founded. It enjoys a few years of wild stardom, followed by an inevitable downturn in the face of graphical games. (Plus the whole Cornerstone thing.)
- 1986: Activision acquires Infocom, saving Infocom’s bacon for a couple of years.
- 1987: Activision’s board replaces CEO Jim Levy, who had brought Infocom on board, with Bruce Davis.
- 1988: Davis shakes up Activision and renames it Mediagenic.
- 1989: Mediagenic/Activision shuts down Infocom as a studio. (It keeps the name alive as an adventure publishing label.)
- 1990-1991: Mediagenic is now itself sliding down the tubes.
- 1991: Bobby Kotick buys the carcass of Mediagenic. To make a quick buck, he has the Infocom library reissued, which saves his bacon. Also there’s Return to Zork.
- 1992-1993: Kotick mulches the rest of Mediagenic and reorganizes it as (effectively) a new company called Activision.
- 1996: Activision reissues the Infocom games again as the Masterpieces CD-ROM. As a bonus, this includes the winners of the first IFComp, including A Change in the Weather. N
