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<TITLE>T E X T F I L E S</TITLE>
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<H1>Adventure Textfiles: INFOCOM</H1>
<P>
Every once in a while, a company or group of people enter an industry (or
create it) who are so far ahead of everyone else, so absolutely the best at
their craft, that others stop even referring to them and just concentrate
on doing the best they can compared the rest of the competitors. In this
case, the industry was Text Adventures, and the company was Infocom.
<P>
Based in Cambridge, MA, and surviving for nearly a decade, Infocom was
started by a group of MIT students who had worked on parsing out full 
sentences and having machines react properly. Whereas most games before
infocom had simple commands like TAKE ROCK or LOOK, Infocom games let
you work in full sentences, enabling you to type things like ASK THE TROLL
ABOUT THE COINS and CLIMB ON TOP OF THE HOUSE. This great interface,
combined with the year (or years) of work put into writing the descriptions
and creating the puzzles, meant that you were riding on the best 
text adventure vehicle out there. 
<P>
Infocom ultimately died as many companies do, with a few fatal business
decisions and with a quiet disappearance, only to have its corpse 
propped up for a series of graphic adventures made by Activision. Regardless
of its fate, this company was unique, and in the world of the 80x24 screen,
they ruled supreme.
<P>
<TABLE WIDTH=100%>
<TD BGCOLOR=#00FF00><FONT COLOR=#000000><B>Filename</B><BR></FONT></TD>
<TD BGCOLOR=#00DD00><FONT COLOR=#000000><B>Size</B><BR></FONT></TD>
<TD BGCOLOR=#00AA00><FONT COLOR=#000000><B>Description of the Textfile</B><BR></TD></TR>
