Editing Infocom (section)

===Changing marketplace===
Infocom's games' sales benefited significantly from the portability offered by running on top of a virtual machine. ''InfoWorld'' wrote in 1984 that "the company always sells games for computers you don't normally think of as game machines, such as the [[DEC Rainbow]] or the [[Texas Instruments Professional Computer]]. This is one of the key reasons for the continued success of old titles such as Zork."<ref name="mace19840402">{{cite news |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kC4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56 |title=Games with windows |work=InfoWorld |date=April 2, 1984 |access-date=February 10, 2015 |author=Mace, Scott |pages=56}}</ref> Dornbrook estimated that year that of the 1.8&nbsp;million home computers in America, one half million homes had Infocom games ("all, if you count the pirated games").{{r|dyer19840506}} Computer companies sent prototypes of new systems to encourage Infocom to port Z-machine to them; the virtual machine supported more than 20 different systems, including [[orphaned technology|orphaned computers]] for which Infocom games were among the only commercial products. The company produced the only third-party games available for the Macintosh at launch,{{r|maher20130320}} and Berlyn promised that all 13 of its games would be available for the Atari ST within one month of its release.<ref name=chinsoft19850128>{{cite news|author=Chin, Kathy|title=Atari Promises Software For ST|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6i4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA15
|work=InfoWorld|date=January 28, 1985|access-date=March 19, 2011|page=17}}</ref>

The virtual machine significantly slowed ''Cornerstone''{{'}}s execution speed, however. Businesses were moving ''en masse'' to the IBM PC platform by that time, so portability was no longer a significant differentiator. Infocom had sunk much of the money from games sales into ''Cornerstone''; this, in addition to a slump in computer game sales, left the company in a very precarious financial position. By the time Infocom removed the copy-protection and reduced the price to less than $100, it was too late, and the market had moved on to other database solutions.

By 1982 the market was moving to graphic adventures. Infocom was interested in producing them, that year proposing to [[Penguin Software]] that Antonio Antiochia, author of its ''[[Transylvania (computer game)|Transylvania]]'', provide artwork. Within Infocom the game designers tended to oppose graphics, while marketing and business employees supported using them for the company to remain competitive. The partnership negotiations failed, in part because of the difficulty of adding graphics to the Z-machine, and Infocom instead began a series of advertisements mocking graphical games as "graffiti" compared to the human imagination. The marketing campaign was very successful, and Infocom's success led to other companies like [[Broderbund]] and [[Electronic Arts]] also releasing their own text games.{{r|dyer19840506}}<ref name="maher20130320">{{cite web |url=http://www.filfre.net/2013/03/the-top-of-its-game/ |title=The Top of its Game |work=The Digital Antiquarian |date=March 20, 2013 |access-date=July 10, 2014 |author=Maher, Jimmy}}</ref>