Zarf Updates

Of course the first thing that happens is someone corrects my chronology. (Thanks dukdukgoos!)

In my original post, I wrote "March: Zork 3; April: Starcross; May: Deadline." In fact Deadline was released before the other two.

Back when I put together my Infocom catalog index page, I copied off Paul David Doherty's venerable Infocom Fact Sheet. Except I think I copied the wrong section. Or something. Anyhow, I got them out of order -- and then failed to recheck my own list when I planned the Patreon.

To double-check, let's look at Margot Comstock Tommervik's review of Starcross:

If it takes a minimum of two instances to form a proposition, then Starcross, adventurous Infocom's first foray into science fiction and second departure from the dungeons of Zork, enables the proposition that this young company is one of remarkable versatility [...]. Deadline, the you-solve-it mystery, was, of course, instance one.

-- from Softalk Magazine, Nov 1982

Zork 3 was reviewed a couple of months previously, if you want to check that. In fact the archives of Softalk and Softline are a great record of the first half of Infocom's career; they reviewed the games obsessively until both magazines shut down in mid-1984.

(You can browse these Infocom articles and many more at the Invisiclues fan site.)

Those contemporary sources match the "Chronology" section of PDD's Fact Sheet:

• Zork 1
• Zork 2
• Deadline
• Zork 3
• Starcross
• Suspended
• The Witness
• Planetfall
• Enchanter
• Infidel
• Sorcerer
• Seastalker
• ...and so on.

(Those are the "Folio" game releases. After Seastalker, Infocom adopted the now-more-famous "Grey Box" format.)

Interestingly, if you look at the earliest preserved serial number of each game -- excluding files tagged "alpha" or "beta" -- you get the same order. This means we probably have the first-shipped version of every game. Nice to know! You can also see that development on each game was usually locked the month before the ship date. Not bad for a release process that involved stuffing physical disks into physical boxes.

Anyhow, I'm keeping Zork 3 at the top of the Patreon schedule (March). I want to wrap up the trilogy right off the (Babe Flathead) bat. If everything moves forward as planned, I'll do Deadline in April, Starcross in May, and so on.

(This entry is cross-posted to the Patreon site.)