Infocom Text Adventure Sales Numbers
So how much money DID Infocom really make on all those text adventures in the 1980s?

GameSetWatch has the numbers!

Not actual dollar amounts, but unit sales over several years in the 1980s. And that in itself is fascinating. Some notes:

Total Zork I sales: Nearly 380,000.

Total Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sales: Over 250,000.

Zork I sold more copies its fourth year than the previous three years combined (152,100 compared to 144,000). What a far cry from today's games where a game only has a shelf-life of about 90 days!

The "Average" adventure game sold around 80,000 copies from 1981 to 1986. However, that ranges everywhere from a mere 8,000 copies (of Fooblitsky), all the way up to Zork I at 380,000. If you remove Hitchhiker's and the Zork games and the trilogy packs from the mix, you are talking an average of under 52,000 units sold. So those licenses really skewed the mix. So... "average" is a pretty meaningless value. Remember this when you ask how much an "average" indie game sells!

Zork I went on to sell over 50,000 more copies from 1987 - 1989, seven YEARS after its initial release.

The other big "sleeper hit" was Deadline, which sold over 140,000 copies. But that success might not have been due to the game, so much as it benefitting from being one of the first games "from the makers of Zork."

Labels: Adventure Games

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