#Happy game lore software#

Vezza, ironically, had the clearest idea about the company: The name “Infocom,” which remains remarkably undescriptive, was chosen before there was a clear idea of what the company might do.

Many of these would-be entrepreneurs had not quit their day jobs in the early days of 1979. He is always the villainous bumbler of the Infocom story, but how did he get to be where he was, doing what he did? It really does seem that Infocom collectively wanted him to be a CEO at one point in its history. These were, one must guess, highly competitive environments with countless qualified people chasing after employment therein. He had been in charge of the DM group, and, later, an assistant director of LCS. Still, he must have been good at something. By all accounts that I can find, he was not charismatic, inspirational, visionary, shrewd, or even a team player. The students liked to call him “Lick.”Īl Vezza was a different case, and it is hard to shake the impression that even the most generous authors interested in Infocom have struggled to keep from saying something (or many things) genuinely nasty about him. Licklider was, by all accounts, a likable and well-connected mentor type who had interfaced with Defense Advanced Research Projects (DARPA) to secure funding for various MIT projects. Both had prominent roles in MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) of which the DM group was a part. At this story’s beginning, some directors of Infocom came and went, but two played crucial and lasting roles at Infocom’s “big kids’ table:” Professors Al Vezza and J.C.L. It needed men (they were always men back then, weren’t they?) of experience, serious men, to talk to press, investors, realtors, and banks.

These weren’t the boom years of the late 90’s, though: real companies were run by grown-ups, and this little company would be no different. The students were clever twentysomethings, and smart even by MIT standards. They were in many ways strangers to failure and would remain so for a handful of happily ascendant years. Some even managed to co-write Zork, a massive PDP text adventure game, in their spare time. This wasn’t naiveté or arrogance: these people came from one of the most elite technical schools in the world, where they not only survived but thrived. They had no idea what to sell or even what to call themselves, but they were so collectively confident in their abilities that success seemed nevertheless assured.

#Happy game lore software#

Various sources all tell the same story: a handful of MIT students and faculty associated with its Dynamic Modeling Group computer lab decided to found a small software company.