inflate = I = initgame
Infocom n.
A now-legendary games company, active from 1979 to 1989, that commercialized the MDL parser technology used for
Zork to produce a line of text adventure games that remain favorites among hackers. Infocom's games were
intelligent, funny, witty, erudite, irreverent, challenging, satirical, and most thoroughly hackish in spirit. The
physical game packages from Infocom are now prized collector's items. After being acquired by Activision in 1989 they
did a few more "modern" (e.g. graphics-intensive) games which were less successful than reissues of their classics.
The software, thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were written in a kind of P-code and distributed with a
P-code interpreter core, and not only open-source emulators for that interpreter but an actual compiler as well have
been written to permit the P-code to be run on platforms the games never originally graced. In fact, new games written
in this P-code are still being written. There is a home page at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/, and it is even
possible to play these games in your browser if it is Java-capable.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, this entry manually entered by rootbeer277.