The ill-advised business software that helped sink videogame pioneers Infocom now runs on modern PCs: ‘It’s a new age for aficionados of failed 1985 database products!’

Infocom is fondly remembered today as the studio responsible for a string of legendary text adventures including the Zork series, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and plenty more. Looking back, the company seems to have been confused about its own strengths, though. While it would be an exaggeration to say that its attempt to diversify into business software was the one thing that sunk Infocom, it sure did make a healthy contribution.

The software in question was Cornerstone, a database program released in 1985. Because Infocom’s text adventures had been designed to run on a virtual machine (called the Z-machine) it was easy to port them to different systems, so Cornerstone was likewise designed to run on its own virtual machine. Unfortunately, that made it notoriously slow to use, and the benefit of easy portability meant nothing since by that point IBM-compatibles had won the business sector of the platform war.