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Gaming: Infocom sales by title, graphed
Tue, 21 Oct 2008

The number of units sold to customer ('sell through') in todays gaming industry is very different by orders of magnitude to the good old days when Lord British was hawking Ultima and Akalabeth in ziplock bags. But there were a few brave souls who carved out their niche in the fledgling indutry, and those like Electronic Arts who would survive to this day. Without going into that whole discussion however, we might be curious how some of these moderately successful companies did. Enter Infocom, pioneer of the adventure game and the text adventure (and database if you want to go that far). How did they do?

Mighty Jason Scott of textfiles has stumbled across some data, so take a peak at this graph:


See here for the Flickr page

For when the inevitable happens and the image vanishes .. from 1981-1986 Zork 1 sold 379,000 units, and HHGttG sold 254,000. Later games like Ballyhoo only sold 24,000 but even that is quite a respectible sell through for the time period.

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