The Lost Treasures of Infocom and The Masterpieces of Infocom

an update to my previous article
by Roger J. Long

A further update: the Infocom Documentation Project

September 14, 1997

Activision has done an uneven job when it comes to republishing the Infocom documentation.

• Lost Treasures 1 came with the maps and the hint books (Invisiclues) reprinted.
• Lost Treasures 2 did not. I wound up returning Lost Treasures 2 once because I was sure it has been returned by a customer without the maps and hints. I asked the store to open another copy of Lost Treasures 2. When the second one did not have it, I realized that they never put them in there in the first place. Stupid. Why do it for 1 and not for 2?
• The people who assembled the documentation for the Masterpieces of Infocom did pretty good. There's more of the original documentation scanned in as a .PDF file. But, it could have been better.
  If you read the Maps PDF file, you won't find a map for Bureaucracy. However, you will find Popular Paranoia, the Happitech letter and the Fillmore Better Beezer Card application in it, which is actually the documentation for that game, not a map.

That's why I have kept all my original Infocom programs, even though it's a mix of C64, C128, Amiga, IBM and Apple II versions.

One of the best ways to obtain as near a complete collection of the Infocom games is to purchase The Masterpieces of Infocom. In fact, it is one of the few re-releases to inclued "Leather Goddesses of Phobos". It's an IBM/Mac combo disk. With one of the Infocom interpreter programs, such as Inform or Frotz, you can run most of the programs on the computer of your choosing (provided you have a means of copying files off of the CD-ROM, of course). If Activision does not have it for sale any more, try CD-ROMs Online.