~3 minute readInfocom & TSP team up for Infocomics
Both Infocom and Tom Snyder Productions are located in North Cambridge, Massachusetts. As the pigeon flies, the companies are about a half-mile from each other. But thanks to "no left turn" signs, a shopping center, a dump-turned-park, and a couple of life-threatening rotaries, you have to journey miles in seemingly wrong directions to drive from one company to the other.
Similarly, Infocom and Tom Snyder Productions (TSP) are philosophical neighbors separated by a labyrinthine medium. Both companies protect unique corporate cultures that encourage creativity, and both are known for producing innovative, high-quality software. Yet Infocom is the king of all-text adventure games, while TSP is the renegade frontiersman of educational software. What brought the companies together was their shared daring to develop a whole new kind of product.
Games for students
TSP was founded in 1980 by Tom Snyder (no relation to the TV talk-show personality of the same name). While teaching fifth grade, Tom made his geography and history lessons more fun by devising simulations and games for the students. Soon he was using his home computer to keep track of all the class information, and eventually he was designing educational software for both students and teachers.
Tom doesn't have his Ph.D. in education (in fact, he says his academic record is "below average"). He's a rock-and-roll musician and a self-proclaimed computer nerd; yet he is considered one of the country's leading educators. He has strong convictions, trusts his instincts, and with his talented staff, he has built a successful and well-respected company.
Though TSP has produced mostly educational software, it has dabbled before in the entertainment market with Puppy Love, where players teach tricks to an electronic dog, and The Other Side, a multiplayer game similar to Diplomacy.
Ten years of experience
Infocom brought to Infocomics ten years of experience in interactive storytelling. TSP brought the technology, the artists, and the idea to tell a story through graphics. Computers today are capable of displaying graphics of extraordinary detail and color. Most software developers, let loose like kids in a candy store, spend lots of time and disk space trying to "max out" the graphics capabilities. (This craze hit a peak recently when the publisher of a new game boasted "The graphics in the boot-screen take up more disk space than everything else put together!") TSP, as usual, bucked the trend, focusing its efforts on using the pictures, not just showing them.
TSP designed highly evocative, minimalist, comic-book-style line drawings, which can move or transform. Thus, even though each Infocomic has hundreds or thousands of images, there's plenty of room for a long, rich story. The result: graphics which tell and are the story, rather than "paintings" which mask, over-whelm, or are irrelevant to the story.
Like editing a film
Infocom and TSP were equal creative partners in the development of Infocomics. Together they kicked around ideas for each story. Infocom drew a "flowchart" diagramming the criss-crossing paths of each character in the story, and wrote a script for each scene in the flowchart. TSP then used the script and flowchart as a foundation, adding new ideas as the pictures were drawn. Each week TSP gave a work-in-progress disk to Infocom, and like the editing of a film, both companies worked together to improve both the text and graphics, right up to the last minute.
Infocom and TSP are proud of the first three Infocomics: Lane Mastodon vs. The Blubbermen, Gamma Force in Pit of a Thousand Screams, and ZorkQuest: Assault on Egreth Castle.
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
