I was wondering where the best place is to buy/get info com games. Any help? It’s frustrating. 
Not where, when. 1984 is a good bet.
There are usually plenty for sale on eBay.
If you know your way around abandonware rings, you can also find a fair share. You can also find, say, Apple II versions, or Spectrum versions, or Commodore or Amiga or whatever, and use tools to extract the .dat file from those games so you can play them on your interpreter of choice.
Simple, actually. The Pirate Bay. No documentation though; you need to track that down separately, which is also pretty simple, just search out every game title individually as you play it.
Not sure you can actually name names, though. Even though we’re all cool, abandonware is still legally tricky business…
EDIT - And regarding documentation, be sure to check out infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/. I actually downloaded and printed all the images and docs. Doesn’t replace the real thing, but it sure feels nice to own. 
Heh, I even printed the Trinity sundial onto harder paper and glued it up.
Call it an act of civil disobedience. There is no case I’m aware of where the application of copyright laws is a more braindead, pointless exercise.
In that case, go right ahead. Though I’d usually prefer Home of the Underdogs.
Yeah I don’t know if this is in contravention of the board rules or whatever. I figure as long as nobody actually links to anything there is no possibility of any legal problems (and even if they do it’s vanishingly unlikely). This is one of those cases where copyright really does the opposite of what it’s supposed to. Anyway if these posts need to be redacted or something it so be it but it’s really just a sad situation for the community’s sense of history, IMO.
P.
What do you mean by documentation exactly?
BTW thank you guys for this
We mean the manuals, and… all the feelies and all the extra information. You see, Infocom - starting right up with Deadline - packaged their games with all sort of documentation. Not just the game manual - Infidel, for instance, came with a “Tales of Adventure” magazine. Hollywood Hijinx, among other things, came with an autographed photo of your uncle Bud.
Most importantly, in cases like Moonmist, sometimes they used the documentation to spare some size in the actual game so they could fit other things (in Moonmist, room descriptions are practically all in the brochure you get with the game). And most importantly of all, there’s always information (except, possibly, on Zork I, II and III) critical for your gameplay. Maybe it’s a code, like in A Mind Forever Voyaging; a set of coordinates in Infidel; just instructions for play, for Suspended and A Mind Forever Voyaging; all sorts of things.
Bottom line, if you play Infocom without ALL the documentation, you’ll miss out of most of the experience… and not only that, you simply won’t get far at all.
Thanks, that explains why I some of the games I did have “didn’t work”
People do what they do, but the IF community has a good relationship with Activision and Infocom materials. I think we should shy away from advocating piracy.
David C.
Yeah, that’s a good place too. Pity that so many of them are in black and white.
What do you mean exactly? Mostly I’m not sure what the word “materials” is doing, but also, what does the “good relationship” consist in?
It’s a pragmatic argument you are making (i.e. do what it takes to preserve the relationship), but in the case of pragmatism, one has to weigh what is gained with what is lost. So, maintaining Activision’s benign neglect vs. pointing interested people toward the actual games…
P.
Oh, and for the original poster, you can play a version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the BBC’s site which I believe is a port of the Infocom game, with illustrations. Don’t know how they did the port.
(I also thought of one conceivable answer to my previous question, which is that I suppose it might be possible for Activision to make themselves obnoxious about use of the Z-machine, and they haven’t.)
For example, when someone in the IF community asked “Can we scan all your manuals and put them on a web site for historical interest?”, someone at Activision said “yes”. Similarly, several people have gotten permission to release free IF games set in the Zork world. Stuff like that.
I don’t want to overstate it. That’s a good relationship with some people at Activision. A company doesn’t have relationships except for legal and contractual ones, and Activision has as many lawyers as any big company. The lawyers have never come down on us, and we – as a community – have avoided doing things that might provoke them. (E.g., we haven’t posted the Infocom game files on the Archive.) You can call that a good relationship, benign neglect, or just lack of communication. I don’t want to change it, though.