~2 minute readInside the Industry
Infocom's West Coast Move Stirs Controversy
The dismantling of Infocom as an east coast subsidiary of Mediagenic offers mixed signals regarding the future of the storytelling division. To many industry observers, moving Infocom to the Menlo Park headquarters of Mediagenic was inevitable. The failure of Cornerstone, the database produced by Infocom, necessitated an infusion of capital. The acquisition of the company which was once synonymous with interactive fiction became inevitable. Infocom's corporate functions were assimilated by Mediagenic in a gradual evolution designed to reduce overhead and streamline operations. In addition, Infocom's inability to get new products out in 1988, tremendous research and development costs in upgrading the development system, and technical snafus with regard to releasing MS-DOS SKUs during the initial roll-out of new products in 1989 took its toll on the viability of the Massachusetts subsidiary.
Herein lies the dispute. Sources inside Infocom believe that Mediagenic pulled the plug just when the money invested in graphics development (admittedly, more difficult and expensive to implement than the original projections) had started to pay off. Background sources suggest that the entire Mac II development system is paid for, but except for Marc Blank, there is no real indication that it will be used. In addition, there are leaks about a completely new parser that may never be used. ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), the current development system, is functionally dead.
However, Rob Sears (General Manager for Infocom), insisted that it would have taken more than two years for the east coast subsidiary to recoup its losses. He noted the MS-DOS problems and suggested that the consolidation might not have been necessary if the IBM SKUs could have been released initially. Nevertheless, he has noted that Duncan Blanchard, a wizard Macintosh programmer, moved to the west coast to join Mediagenic's Technology Group. Duncan is allegedly working on a hybrid technology between ZIL and future storytelling projects.
Of the 24 people who were employed at the time of the east coast shutdown, twelve were asked to make the move to the west coast and five accepted. Of the five, Donald and Elizabeth Langoisey are working on a hypercard story. Donald is a computer artist who has worked on some of the latest Infocom products and Elizabeth wrote two stories for the Infocomics series. Joe Ybarra, VP of Entertainment at Mediagenic, expressed great hope in the hypercard product, suggesting that it would be more of an adventure and less of a simple exploratory toy (like Manhole and Cosmic Osmo). The new direction in the company's approach to storytelling products was made clear when Ybarra suggested, "We cannot continue, in the marketplace, living off products that take eight hours to learn to play well and up to 200 hours to complete."
This article appeared in
Computer Gaming World
Sep 1989
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