What I wouldn’t give to see a similar release of Origin Systems materials!

Digital historian and archivist Jason Scott — the director of the text adventure documentary GET LAMP — connected with game developer Steve Meretzky during the making of said film, and discovered that Meretzky had very meticulously archived a massive collection of documents from his time at Infocom:

If you’re coming into this relatively new, or even if you need a little brush-up, let me state: Steve Meretzky has earned the title of “Game God” several times over, having been at the center of the early nadir of computer games in the 1980s and persisting, even thriving, in the years since. He continues to work in the industry, still doing game design, 35 years since he started out as a tester at what would become Infocom.

But more than that – besides writing a large amount of game classics in the Interactive Fiction realm, he also was an incredibly good historian and archivist, saving everything.

EVERYTHING.

When we finally connected during production (as it turned out, we lived within 10 miles of each other), Steve showed me his collection of items he had from the days of Infocom (which spanned from roughly 1981 through to the company’s eventual closing and absorption by Activision in the early 1990s).

Some of the materials that Meretzky provided were used in GET LAMP, but Scott wasn’t satisfied to leave it at that. Thus, this has now happened:

Today, I’m dropping the first set of what I hope will be the vast majority of the stuff I scanned during that production year, onto the Internet Archive. The collection is called The Infocom Cabinet, and right now it has every design notebook/binder that Steve Meretzky kept during the period of what most people consider “Classic” Infocom. This includes binders for:

• Planetfall (1983) (Part 1, Part 2)
• Sorcerer (1984)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984)
• A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985)
• Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986)
• Stationfall (1987)
• Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz (1988)

Right there are nearly 4,000 pages of material to go through related to the production of these games.

…

(PLEASE NOTE: I HAVE REDACTED THE NAMES AND PERSONAL INFORMATION OF THE PLAYTESTERS INVOLVED – ORIGINAL UNREDACTED COPIES ARE NOT ONLINE BUT EXISTENT.)

And that’s not all:

…Steve kept all the memos, business process, and related papers that were generated through Infocom Inc.’s life. Like, pretty much all of it.

This gets slightly harder for me to put up – I am going to have to work with Steve and some of the other people involved as to what can go up now and what should stay in Stanford’s stacks for researchers to work with. But for now, a healthy set of materials have gone up:

• Infocom Sales Data
• Photographs and Slides during Infocom’s Life
• Advertisements and Ad Copy
• Phone and Employee Lists
• Development Schedules
• Zork Implementation Language documentation
• Moving Infocom to its Second Cambridge Location

This is a relatively tiny amount of the total internal company scans I have made, but these are the ones that I can put up without worrying about it crashing into anyone’s life. Again, personal information has been removed, and the focus has been on company process and interesting historical documents.

You can find the entire set of uploaded documents at Archive.org’s Infocom Cabinet page; that’s right, this is all being hosted now by the Library of Congress. It’s a fantastic collection of data, and offers an incredible level of insight into the design and creation of many of Infocom’s early text adventures.