Most Infocom standard grey-box releases, probably untill the Activision aquisition, showed an ISBN code right upon their bar-codes. The ISBN agency actually never considered including video-games in their system and no ISBN searcher would recognise any of them as a valid number. So my best guess is they are just… fake!
A very well elaborated fake, I would say, as the bit corresponding to the publisher ID is consistent among them (87321). Was this sort of an in-joke related to that marketing statement about IF being the stuff you would get at bookshops in the future?
Yeah, and books-by-ISBN doesn’t list anything ever published under that prefix. It jumps from 0-87319 (Halberg Pub Corp) to 0-87322 (Human Kinetics) so I bet Infocom bought a chunk of ISBNs and then assigned them but didn’t register them since they’re videogames? And then ownership got transferred when Activision bought them? The numbers look reasonable otherwise - the check digit checks out.
Infocom games (and other computer games) were 100% sold in bookstores.
What is your source for words like “never” and “no”?
A lot of things which were Data Used In Business Computing in the 1980s didn’t make the leap to the Internet age, particularly for products with a fairly limited retail sale life… like computer games.
Board games and music and other things that don’t get ISBNs have also 100% been sold in bookstores…
I tried a bunch of ISBN-search websites; they all seem to be using the same database (cite the same rough number of titles included, etc.). None of them turned up results for the “ISBNs” that I could find for Infocom games. They DO turn up plenty of books from similar timeframes, and AFAIK a lot of the point of ISBNs has always been that the publishing data gets centrally catalogued, so I doubt this is a “data didn’t make the leap to digital” thing?
Bowker’s ISBN Eligibility FAQ says that video games aren’t eligible now. Looking through various revisions of the ISO standard, I don’t see explicit historical mention of them, but it looks like software is generally ruled out unless it was a digital form of a physical book?
It could have been a “data didn’t make the leap from Activision to the central database”, because the book publishing companies were the ones with the well-established pipeline.
(The paperwork might well still have moved on on actual paper at that point. If you didn’t know who to send the paperwork to…?)
Oh, that’s fascinating. They’re under Addison-Wesley’s publisher prefix, not the Activision (Infocom?) publisher prefix that rockersuke has, and that’s on the Deadline box photo here.
Yup, excluding previously well-known ISBN numbers as noveliztions, CYOA books, etc… all the ISBN code that refers to proper games in Jon’s search consistently point to Addison-Wesley.
Book publishing company Addison-Wesley has been known to publish a handful of games during the 80’s, see:
It looks like the Addison-Wesley ISBNs were originated in 1984 but do not seem to include the later games. I’ve got a complete set of the Infocom gray box editions in storage so I’ll dig these out to see whether any of the early games are using the Addison-Wesley ISBNs.
ISBNs are never removed so it’s an interesting anomaly that the games were published quoting an ISBN that never seems to have been registered. I wonder there is any reference to this anomaly in the New Zork Times newsletters from that period.
