<!--
	Title: Activision teleports Infocom to California!
	Source: QuestBusters, v6(7)
	Date: July 1989
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

The little white house has been boarded up, the entrance to *Zork*'s Great Underground
Empire sealed off, and thousands of curious artifacts and red herrings
packed away in boxes: little more than two years after Activision's acquisition
of Infocom, the California-based company has shut down Infocom's Cambridge,
Massachussets, office. First word came at the Computer Game Developers Conference
in Sunnyvale, where the author of *Planetfall* and *Zork Zero* was seen wearing
a badge that said "Steve Meretzky: Make me an offer."

Don't panic, however, for according to Joe Ybarra, vice president in charge of
Activision entertainment software, "The Great Underground Empire, curiously
enough, has not been shut down. What's happened is that we're in the process of
relocating it to the West Coast" [far from M. I. T.'s Artificial Intelligence lab,
birthplace of *Zork* and the Infocom saga]. "As you might imagine, a lot of the rationale
for doing that is financial. Market conditions as a whole are not as good as
in the past And of course for Infocom and the type of product we've been building
in the past, it's definitely gotten a lot worse.

## *Consolidating on the Coast*

"On the other side, there were a couple of other issues, starting with the
changes we were making in ZIL (Zork Implementation Language). Many of
those changes were to get object-oriented graphics, animation and sound effects
into the code. A lot of that was already ongoing at Mediagenic on the West
Coast, so rather than having a 3,OOO-mile difference between the places where the
programming was going on, it was a lot more efficient to put it all under one roof.
[Activision changed its corporate name to Mediagenic in 1988, keeping the Activision
name for its entertainment line.] Last but not least was consolidating all
the 'people resources' in terms of getting our designing, producing and management
all under one roof.

"Basically we're keeping Infocom as a separate business unit inside Mediagenic,
with Rob Sears as General Manager. We want to keep Infocom going, and with all
the rumors going around now, we're eager to let our illustrious users know that
we're not stopping development— on the contrary, Marc Blank is actually working on
project for us right now. It's not a *Journey* sequel, at least in the literal sense, and
won't even use the same system. This one will have a lot more graphics and
animation."

<figure class="float-right">
<img src="/public/img/articles/questbusters-activision-teleports-infocom/ybarra-picture.jpg" alt="Joe Ybarra">
<figcaption class="bold center">Joe Ybarra (with optional palm tree growing from top of head)</figcaption>
</figure>

Knowledgeable text adventurers have revelled at the humorous references to Infocom
insiders over the years, things like the Dorn Beast in Sorcerer, a send-up
of Michael Dornbrook (founder of the Zork User group and head of Infocom's
marketing until now). Like Dornbrook, the rest of the original crew won't be teleporting
to California. Marc Blank, on the West Coast since last year, is working
from home on his next Infocom game, but Dave Lebling, Steve Meretzky and Stu Galley,
the sole survivors of the Activision buy-out in the spring of 1986, apparently
turned down the chance to head west.

"We're trying to negotiate with Meretzky and Lebling to do projects, and it's
not clear whether they'll stay with us," Ybarra said, "but they won't be making
the trip to the West Coast. Actually that's been a problem for us, because there are
several people we'd prefer to see go with us, but who want to remain in the Boston
area.

"Elizabeth Langosey, who's been with Infocom more than five years and is staying
in Boston, is developing a project for us. It's not clear where Lebling will end
up. Steve Meretzky will probably move on to other things, and Michael Dornbrook
is contemplating starting a mail order business."

## *Like a Rolling Cornerstone*

When Infocom was originally sold to Activision, two reasons were apparent,
though only one was cited: Infocom would benefit from Activision's "worldwide
distribution," according to then-President Joel Berez. Industry rumor-mongers
insisted Infocom had gone off the deep end with *Cornerstone*, an IBM
data base with which they had hoped to crack the applications market (being in
the same building with Lotus seems to have affected their logical processes,
since *Gravestone* would have been a more appropriate name).

The product line changed little after the Activision buy-out, until the 1988 decision
to do away with all-text games in favor of graphic adventures and role-playing
games. Activision had formerly marketed only a couple of graphic adventures,
like Interplay's *Mindshadow*.

For gamers, the big question is not where Infocom is located but how the
move will affect the games. Ybarra foresees that "...you'll probably see a shifting
in direction that's commensurate with which way the market is headed. If
you look at all the successful products, they're graphics-and sound-intensive.
Products as a whole are pushing more toward role-playing than toward our classic
adventure game. I think we'll be building more hybrids that share elements
of all these different genres. In particular, one of the areas I find most
exciting is getting into more interactive graphics [similar to ICOM Simulations'
*Deja Vu*] the idea of doing things that are object-oriented...a cross between
*Manhole* and the Hypercard environment and our traditional object-oriented ZIL
environment.

"Since Rob is General Manager, I won't be directly managing Infocom in
the future. My role is vice president of entertainment software development,
dealing with not only Infocom issues but also all the computer software issues and
videogames."

Sears, who joined Infocom about a year ago, says he spent "eight or nine
years in the toy industry, working with Milton-Bradley and Coleco on strategy
and board games, that type of thing, as well as the hand-held electronic games,
and the Vectrex and Atari 2600. The fascinating thing about coming to Infocom
from the toy industry," Sears elaborated, "is that there are so many similarities (in
terms of game design), that get carried over from traditional archetypes in determination
of different dynamics in game-play, how the different elements come together
and the cross-over, in terms of the consumer, from the hobby gamer to the
computer gamer. There's really a huge overlap, and I'm seeing a lot of old
friends in a new light."

Ybarra, who worked behind the scenes producing *Star Flight*, *Bard's Tale* and
other RPGs for Electronic Arts until he moved to Activision late last year, hinted
at an even heavier emphasis on role-playing games for Infocom: "We recently
hired Mike Moore, who was with Victory Games [a paper and pencil RPG outfit]
and editor and publisher of *Aries Magazine*, to help pioneer new game designs,
which reinforces Rob's observation on the similarities between the traditional
board game genre and computer games. One of the things I found really fascinating,
having worked with Michael Stackpole and Brian Fargo on *Wasteland*, is
that getting the board game guys more involved in the stuff we're doing on computers
is a real boon to the design capabilities of where our genre is
headed."
