Infocom fought software piracy with scratch and sniff cards, sold games in bookstores next to hardcover novels, turned down a $28 million buyout from Simon and Schuster, and then destroyed itself by building a business database. This deep dive follows the MIT academics who created Zork on a PDP-10 mainframe in 1977, found their first players through an unsecured ARPANET, and built a text-based empire that moved nearly 680,000 copies of the original trilogy.

We break down the technical genius of the Z-machine, which let Infocom write a game once and run it on the Apple II, Commodore 64, TRS-80, and IBM PC, and the natural language parser that made computers feel alive. We explore the feelies packed into boxes like Starcross and Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the tiered Invisiclues hint books with fake questions, and the Enchanter Easter egg th ...