The company was a software company that was located in Wheeling, Illinois. In addition, they are most popular for developing the MacVenture series of adventure games in which Shadowgate is included. Originally, the company was established under the name TMQ Software by Tod Zipnick back in March 1981. The company started the point-and-click games with the MacVenture series. After a few years, they introduced the popular Sherlock Holmes games. As for the founder of the company, Tod died of Hodgkin’s disease back in 1991. In addition, it was noted that he died just when the company started going upwards. In the early 1990s, the company was a big third party creator for the TurboGrafx-16 platform in the United States. They manufactured many games for the console in which Beyond Shadowgate is included.
Moreover, ICOM Simulations was officially bought by Viacom New Media back in 1993. The company in 1998 was officially renamed to Rabid Entertainment. The name and the logo of the company went officially out of use on February 14, 1998. In addition, the rights to the company’s game portfolio were held by the well-known software developer company, Infinite Ventures. However, in January 2012, all those rights were obtained by David Marsh. In March the same year, Karl Roelofs and Dave Marsh, who were both ex-employees at ICOM, founded a new developer company under the name Zojoi, LLC.
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective
For those who don’t know, this game is a full motion video game that’s based on a tabletop gamebook hybrid that carried the same name. Moreover, the game was originally created by ICOM for the FM Tows computer. The game was also published back in 1997 by ICOM. However, the game was later ported to Apple Macintosh, Sega CD, TurboGrafx-CD, Commodore CDTV, Tandy Video Information System and DOS with all different versions that were being manufactured on CD-ROM. In addition, this game was re-published back in 1999 as a DVD for use with a standard DVD player and TV. Also, a re-mastered and a higher resolution version of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective was officially published on September 18, 2012 for Microsoft Windows, iPad and OS X.
