Infocom

With Atari’s VCS dead in the water and its successor, the 5200 a non-starter, Activision put most of its efforts into computer titles. High points of their 1985 releases included Crane’s innovative artificial life game Little Computer People and the complex adventure/strategy title Hacker. Reinforcing its PC focus, Activision began the process of acquiring Infocom, creators of Zork and an innovator in text adventure games.

Infocom enjoyed a string of hits in the early eighties with titles like A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Lurking Horror but had fallen on hard times when the company tried to unsuccessfully branch out to database software.

Activision’s offer to buy Infocom seemed to provide a way out for the struggling company. However, as the deal was being inked, Activision’s board of directors decided to replace Jim Levy and brought in Bruce Davis as the new CEO. Davis was unhappy with the merger and felt that the purchase of Infocom was too costly for Activision. What was to be an “Info Wedding” quickly turned sour. Davis was a San Francisco lawyer who had previously overseen the dissolution of Imagic and after the deal was finalized in 1986, Activision filed a lawsuit in attempt to recoup money from Infocom’s shareholders.

Under Activision’s guidance Infocom moved toward producing graphic adventures, creating Zork Zero, James Clavell’s Shogun, and publishing Westwood’s BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception. The new Infocom’s profits never matched their early years and by 1989 Activision shut the company down, later publishing The Lost Treasures of Infocom I and II CD-ROM collections in 1991 and 1992 as testament to Infocom’s past achievements.

Let It Be

The financial damage caused by the 1983-1984 Crash persisted for years. “The company was strong enough to weather the crash,” Crane remembered. “We had kept tight controls on cash, and so we were in OK shape. Jim Levy’s strategy was to come up with the best estimate of what the business would look like in one year, and then downsize the company to match that target. Every year he was just a little too optimistic, and the business took years to recover.”

“When the board put Bruce Davis in charge of Activision, it was a deathblow. I tried to work with him, but found that he had no creative or marketing skills. His only prior job was to run Imagic out of business – bringing it in for a landing, as it is said. The Activision that I had a hand in creating was gone, so I left,” Crane said. Crane continued to work for a time as an independent developer, creating games for Activision and then joined Gary Kitchen to form Absolute Entertainment in 1988.

Mediagenic

With the home console market in a deep freeze and the company’s founders all gone, Activision struggled to find its place. Over the next two years it would publish important titles like Alter Ego and the enduring puzzle game Shanghai but sales were poor and the company began to explore business and productivity software, marketing a line of HyperCard based products under its TenpointO and Activision Presentation Tools labels.

In 1988, still trying to find a viable market strategy, Activision reorganized and changed its name to Mediagenic. Although the company emphasized its reorientation to business software by publishing Danny Goodman’s Focal Point and Business Class as well as Paintworks and Reports, Mediagenic continued to release games under the Activision and Infocom brand names. In 1989 it published a CD-ROM version of Robyn and Rand Miller’s The Manhole, one of the first games available for PC CD drives.