Text adventures have had a long gaming history, from the best sellers of the '80s to the interactive fiction and visual novels of today.  One of the most high-profile developers from the '80s was Infocom, which was responsible for such classics as Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and many, many more.  Steve Meretzky was one of Infocom's primary creative forces, deeply involved with the company's best-loved games, and as it turns out he's also a relentlessly-organized packrat/historian.  Every bit of paper and information that crossed his desk got stored away in folders and binders, documenting not just game creation but life at Infocom.  Jason Scott met Steve Meretzky during research and filming of Get Lamp, a documentary about the text adventure games of the '80s, and discovered this incredible archive of data.  Since then it's been catalogued, re-organized, and scanned, and now the first 4,000 pages are available at Archive.org as The Infocom Cabinet.

The reason this is notable is for two reasons.  First, this is a wealth of information about gaming history, and while I completely understand not wanting to comb through thousands of pages of notes and data (with thousands more pages on the way) it's an invaluable find for those interested in the period.  Secondly, it's hard to overstate how rare this is.  The video gaming industry has always struggled with being both overly-secretive and viewed as disposable, so this kind of information usually gets trashed.  The reason we don't have Panzer Dragoon Saga HD?  The source code is long lost, and if something as important as that is gone, can you imagine where the rest of the design information might have gotten to?  The only way to reconstruct the development of notable games is usually through interviews, which is great from an anecdotal perspective but not so much so when hoping to see the creative process from as many sides as possible.  An archive like Steve Meretzky's Infocom files is practically (and maybe literally) unique.

The current upload is 4,000 pages covering the Infocom golden years.  The full design notebooks for Planetfall, Sorcerer, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall, and Zork Zero are all available as of today.  More company-centric information is organized under sales data, ads and ad copy, photos and slides, development schedules, and a few other administrative sections.  The less game-oriented sections are taking longer to post due to needing to scrub people's private info, and some of it won't be able to get uploaded at all, but the sheer volume of what is available is going to take a good long while to look through.  It's an enormous amount of information, and slightly less than half of what will be available when complete.  Head on over to Jason Scott's page to read the full details of how this amazing find was discovered and archived, and then take a stroll through a massive part of the history of text adventure gaming at The Infocom Cabinet.

Header image credit- Jason Scott