Long before Shadowgate placed players before the doors of a deadly castle, and before Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective put filmed actors onto CD-ROM, the company that became ICOM Simulations was a small Chicago-area software business trying to find its place in a rapidly changing computer industry.
Its history stretches across several distinct eras of video games. The company began in the world of early personal computers, found its breakthrough by adapting adventure games to the Macintosh mouse and window interface, carried those ideas onto the Nintendo Entertainment System, became an early developer of CD-ROM and full-motion video games, and finally attracted the attention of one of the largest entertainment companies in America.
Along the way, ICOM created Déjà Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate, Déjà Vu II, and the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective series. It also produced development tools, console games, licensed projects, and experiments that never reached store shelves. The company disappeared before the end of the 1990s, but much of its work survived, and some of the people who built its most famous games eventually returned to them decades later.
The surviving record now extends far beyond old game boxes and magazine advertisements. The Video Game History Foundation holds approximately ten boxes of material donated by former ICOM artist, designer, and producer David Marsh, including artwork, source code, floppy disks, data tapes, video production materials, recordable LaserDiscs, and even the Macintosh Marsh used to create MacVenture artwork.
Before ICOM, There Was TMQ Software
The beginning of the company requires some explanation because two dates frequently appear in histories of ICOM.
The lineage reaches back to TMQ Software, a company founded by Tod Zipnick in the early 1980s. By May 1982 there is direct contemporary evidence that TMQ was already operating. In an article Zipnick wrote for BYTE, he was identified as president of TMQ Software Inc. in Des Plaines, Illinois. The magazine described him as the head of a Chicago-area software and consulting firm serving the microcomputer industry.
TMQ was not yet the adventure-game company remembered today. An advertisement for its File-Fax database management system appeared in COMPUTE! in 1983. The software was designed for storing and retrieving records and was offered for an unusually broad collection of computers, including the Apple II, Atari 800, IBM PC, NEC PC-8001, Commodore 64, Osborne, and Victor 9000. The advertisement listed TMQ at 82 Fox Hill Drive in Buffalo Grove, Illinois.
That early multiplatform experience mattered. TMQ learned to write software in an industry where hardware standards changed quickly and where a program often had to be adapted for machines with radically different capabilities.
The company also developed technical software. Waldemar Horwat later recalled that the original TMON Macintosh debugger began as his summer project at TMQ Software in 1984, when he was still a junior in high school. Working within the Macintosh 128K’s severe memory limits, Horwat wrote the program in assembly language. Darin Adler later expanded its capabilities, and TMON became a respected Macintosh development tool.
By the middle of the decade, however, the company was moving toward the name and identity that would become famous. Contemporary reporting surrounding ICOM generally treats 1985 as the beginning of the formal ICOM era. That does not mean the earlier TMQ history should be discarded. The clearest way to understand the chronology is that the company’s lineage began with TMQ in the early 1980s, while ICOM Simulations emerged as the recognizable corporate and game-development identity around 1985.
The Macintosh Changes the Direction of the Company
Apple’s Macintosh arrived in 1984 with a mouse, graphical windows, menus, icons, and a philosophy of direct interaction that differed greatly from the command-driven computers many users already knew.
For a software company like TMQ and the emerging ICOM, those features offered an opportunity.
Traditional computer adventure games frequently depended on text parsers. A player might type commands such as “OPEN DOOR,” “GET KEY,” or “LOOK DESK” and hope that the program understood the wording. The Macintosh suggested another possibility. Rather than asking players to describe what they wanted to do, a game could let them manipulate the world visually.
ICOM’s answer was the system that came to be known as MacVenture.
Its first major expression was Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!!, released for the Macintosh in 1985 and published by nearby Mindscape. The game’s original documentation identifies ICOM Simulations as the software copyright holder, and contemporary Mindscape advertising promoted the game as an adventure in which players explored their surroundings with a mouse rather than relying upon the older parser-heavy approach.
The premise was pure hardboiled mystery. The player awakens in a bathroom stall without knowing who he is, why he is there, or what has happened. Evidence scattered through the environment gradually identifies him as private investigator Ace Harding and places him inside a larger criminal mystery.
What made Déjà Vu historically important, however, was not merely its story.
The Macintosh screen could contain separate windows for the player’s surroundings, inventory, exits, and other information. Objects could be selected and manipulated. Commands such as open, examine, operate, and consume replaced the need to construct sentences that a text parser might or might not understand. The interface brought the operating system’s visual logic directly into an adventure game.
Later historian Jimmy Maher described Déjà Vu as an attempt to do for adventure games what the graphical Macintosh interface had done for command-line computing. Although Sierra and later Lucasfilm Games became more prominent names in histories of graphic adventures, ICOM was developing its own important branch of the genre at the same time.
Uninvited and the Growth of MacVenture
ICOM quickly followed Déjà Vu with Uninvited, which replaced noir mystery with horror.
Contemporary Mindscape advertising presented Uninvited as a journey through a mansion filled with demons and specters while emphasizing digitized sound, animation, and simplified commands. It was another demonstration of how the MacVenture structure could support very different kinds of stories without abandoning the underlying interface.
David Marsh joined ICOM during this period. He later recalled meeting a programmer from the company shortly after the Macintosh had appeared. Marsh was already interested in computer art, and the programmer told him about the work being done on Déjà Vu and Uninvited. Marsh eventually contributed artwork to Uninvited while developing another idea with his friend Karl Roelofs.
That idea became Shadowgate.
Marsh remembered that the project passed through several possible names during development. He and Roelofs worked on it while Marsh was also completing Uninvited artwork. Decades later, Marsh traced part of Shadowgate’s inspiration to his childhood enthusiasm for Dungeons & Dragons, particularly an illustration of an adventurer caught in a flooding dungeon room while a skeleton approached. That sense that each room should present a new trap, puzzle, monster, or surprise became central to Shadowgate’s identity.
Inside Castle Shadowgate
Released in 1987, Shadowgate became the best-known MacVenture game.
Rather than waking inside a crime scene or exploring a haunted mansion, the player entered a fantasy castle filled with traps, magical objects, monsters, secret passages, and an unusually large number of ways to die.
The game’s severe technical limitations helped shape its appearance. Karl Roelofs later explained that ICOM was still a small company and wanted the game to fit onto as few floppy disks as possible. With perhaps fifty or sixty rooms competing for limited storage, artists relied heavily on patterns and image compression. Music and sound effects had to be used sparingly. What might appear today as a deliberate minimalist visual style was partly the result of making an ambitious graphical adventure fit onto the storage technology available in the mid-1980s.
The limitations did not prevent the designers from filling the castle with personality. Shadowgate became famous for allowing players to make terrible decisions and then describing the consequences. A torch could go out. A monster could kill the adventurer. A trap could be triggered. An apparently harmless action might become fatal.
The resulting combination of direct manipulation, dark fantasy, puzzle solving, and memorable deaths gave Shadowgate an identity that extended far beyond the Macintosh.
ICOM was already learning how to make that happen.
Taking MacVenture Beyond the Macintosh
MacVenture games eventually appeared on an enormous range of computers. David Marsh later remembered spending substantial time adapting artwork for machines such as the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, Apple II family, and IBM-compatible computers. Each conversion presented its own limitations involving color, memory, resolution, and control.
Then came the Nintendo Entertainment System.
According to Marsh, Japanese developer and publisher Kemco approached ICOM about putting MacVenture games on the NES. The ICOM team initially doubted that the concept would work. The Macintosh games had been designed around windows and a mouse, while the NES offered a television screen, controller, cartridge storage, and technical limitations that appeared fundamentally incompatible with the original design.
Kemco produced a prototype anyway.
The result impressed the ICOM developers. Instead of attempting to reproduce the Macintosh literally, Kemco rebuilt the interaction around the console’s strengths. ICOM reviewed versions of the game, tested them, and commented on the English text while Kemco handled most of the console development.
For a generation of players, the NES editions became their introduction to Déjà Vu, Uninvited, and especially Shadowgate. The unusual interface stood apart from the platformers, shooters, and action games that dominated Nintendo’s console. A game born from the Macintosh graphical user interface had been reshaped to work with a directional pad and buttons.
That ability to move concepts across hardware became one of ICOM’s defining strengths.
Beyond MacVenture
ICOM never consisted solely of four adventure games.
By 1990, Apple’s own Tech Info Library described ICOM Simulations as a Wheeling, Illinois software company specializing in “debuggers, integrators, utilities, and games.” The description is significant because it captures the wider company that existed behind its best-known entertainment products. ICOM’s experience covered both development tools and commercial games.
The company was also thinking increasingly like a publisher. A surviving recording from the 1989 Computer Game Developers’ Conference places ICOM on a session titled “From Developer to Publisher.” The discussion dealt with financing, accounting, marketing, affiliated publishing programs, and the practical problems facing developers that wanted greater control over the commercial side of their games.
At almost the same time, another technology was beginning to offer ICOM a new opportunity.
Compact discs could store vastly more information than cartridges or floppy disks. Developers who had spent years fighting for every kilobyte suddenly had room for recorded speech, music, photographs, and video.
ICOM moved toward CD-ROM early.
Sherlock Holmes and the Interactive Movie
The company’s most ambitious response to CD technology was Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective.
Based on the tabletop detective game, the computer adaptation allowed players to investigate crimes by visiting locations, questioning suspects, reading newspapers, studying clues, and deciding when they had gathered enough evidence to present a solution.
The important technological difference was video.
ICOM filmed live actors portraying Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, suspects, witnesses, and other characters. Contemporary reporting described a production with dozens of speaking parts, large numbers of costumes, purpose-built Victorian sets, and extensive filmed footage. Computer Gaming World argued in 1992 that the result came unusually close to the industry’s long-promised idea of an “interactive movie.”
A January 1991 contemporary report stated that approximately 120 scenes had been filmed with 35 actors and placed total production costs at roughly $1 million, including about $300,000 for the video shoot. The same report noted that ICOM was preparing versions for systems associated with Fujitsu, NEC, and Commodore, demonstrating again how aggressively the company pursued multiplatform development.
The game eventually appeared on an assortment of CD-based platforms including DOS computers, the TurboGrafx-CD, Commodore CDTV, FM Towns, Macintosh, Sega CD, and Tandy’s VIS.
For ICOM, this represented another major transition. The company that had learned to turn Macintosh windows into an adventure interface was now learning how filmed performances could become part of interactive storytelling.
ICOM, NEC, and the CD-ROM Frontier
ICOM’s CD ambitions also brought the company into a relationship with NEC and the TurboGrafx family.
The TurboGrafx-CD was particularly attractive because its optical media offered storage far beyond conventional cartridges. ICOM developed titles for the platform and continued exploring ways to combine traditional game mechanics with speech, music, animation, and video.
A contemporary 1991 report on NEC’s CD plans identified ICOM as the developer of both ShapeShifter and Beyond Shadowgate. The report promoted ShapeShifter with hundreds of simultaneous colors, CD-quality sound, more than thirty-five minutes of voice, and a rock soundtrack, all selling points that would have been difficult or impossible on the older cartridge systems ICOM had worked with.
The company’s abandoned projects are revealing as well. Marsh later recalled MacVenture concepts such as Gossip, Helios, and The Awakening. A proposed Shadowgate sequel was designed but did not emerge in its original form. As the market changed, ICOM devoted increasing attention to console work, licensed properties, and multimedia production.
The Video Game History Foundation’s David Marsh collection now preserves evidence from precisely this period, including design concepts for an unproduced Shadowgate sequel as well as materials connected to Sherlock Holmes, Dracula Unleashed, Road Runner’s Death Valley Rally, and the earlier MacVenture games.
The Death of Tod Zipnick
ICOM’s technological expansion was accompanied by a devastating loss.
Tod Zipnick died on July 5, 1991, after suffering from Hodgkin’s disease.
Game designer Chris Crawford memorialized him in the August 1991 Journal of Computer Game Design, identifying Zipnick as ICOM’s founder and chief executive officer. Crawford specifically remembered Déjà Vu for allowing players to point and click directly on objects and listed Uninvited, Shadowgate, and Déjà Vu II among the company’s accomplishments. He also noted that ICOM was working on a major CD-ROM product when Zipnick died.
Zipnick had guided the company from the much smaller personal-computer industry of the early 1980s into a market increasingly interested in consoles, optical discs, and interactive multimedia.
ICOM continued without him, and within two years it would become part of a corporation far larger than anything surrounding TMQ Software at its beginning.
From Adventure Games to Licensed Console Development
While ICOM continued producing adventure and multimedia titles, its development portfolio expanded in other directions.
Marsh worked on Road Runner’s Death Valley Rally, a Super Nintendo game based on Warner Bros.’ Road Runner cartoons. He later described the project fondly, but the shift was important. ICOM’s future increasingly involved licensed entertainment properties and contract development rather than concentrating primarily on internally created MacVenture adventures.
The company also continued its multimedia experiments. Dracula Unleashed expanded on the live-action approach, using filmed sequences within a horror adventure derived from the world of Bram Stoker’s novel.
By this point ICOM had become valuable for reasons that extended beyond any one game. It possessed experience with Nintendo hardware, Sega hardware, personal computers, CD-ROM, cartridges, full-motion video, licensed characters, and cross-platform development.
That combination attracted Viacom.
Viacom Buys ICOM
In May 1993, Viacom acquired ICOM Simulations and integrated it into Viacom New Media.
UPI reported that ICOM had approximately 65 employees at the time and described Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective as its best-known CD title. The report said ICOM had developed products for systems associated with Nintendo, Sega, Apple, and IBM and noted that Viacom intended to use the acquisition to expand into interactive media connected with properties such as MTV and Nickelodeon.
Viacom’s own corporate filing confirms the strategy. Its 1993 annual report described ICOM as an interactive software development company acquired that May and integrated into Viacom New Media. The filing specifically highlighted Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, reported the fourth-quarter release of Dracula Unleashed, and discussed forthcoming interactive products tied to Rocko’s Modern Life and Beavis and Butt-Head.
The acquisition demonstrated how dramatically the video game industry was changing. ICOM had begun as a small software operation in the era of the Apple II and early microcomputers. A dozen years later, a major cable and entertainment corporation saw interactive software as important enough to purchase an established game developer.
Yet becoming part of a media conglomerate also changed the nature of the studio.
Marsh later remembered that after the Viacom purchase, developers were increasingly directed toward games connected with Paramount, MTV, and Nickelodeon properties. The company continued producing software, but the freedom associated with the MacVenture years was becoming harder to find.
Rabid Entertainment and the End of ICOM
The ICOM name eventually disappeared.
The Video Game History Foundation records that the company was renamed Rabid Entertainment in 1996 and dates its shutdown to 1998.
By then the game industry looked very different from the one ICOM had entered. Three-dimensional graphics, CD-based consoles, increasingly expensive productions, and large publisher-owned development structures were transforming the business.
The small Chicago-area company that had once treated the Macintosh desktop itself as inspiration for an adventure game had been absorbed into that broader transformation.
The properties it created, however, did not disappear with the studio.
The Games Outlive the Company
Rights to parts of ICOM’s catalog eventually moved away from Viacom.
In 2000, GameSpot reported that Infinite Ventures had acquired the rights to the three Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective titles and Dracula Unleashed from Viacom, with plans to revive them on DVD and potentially in other formats.
The story eventually circled back to people who had helped create the original games.
David Marsh later reacquired rights to major ICOM properties and formed Zojoi with Karl Roelofs. By 2012 the former ICOM developers were again working with Shadowgate, Déjà Vu, Uninvited, and Sherlock Holmes. Marsh and Roelofs subsequently produced a modern reimagining of Shadowgate, while other pieces of the old catalog returned on newer platforms.
Even an abandoned sequel found a second life. Marsh had kept an old Beyond Shadowgate design document for roughly three decades. Material from that unrealized project eventually helped inspire a new Beyond Shadowgate released decades after the original ICOM era.
Preserving ICOM’s History
The survival of ICOM’s internal material has made the company’s history unusually tangible.
In April 2024, David Marsh donated his ICOM collection to the Video Game History Foundation. The archive contains paper records, CD-Rs, floppy disks, data tapes, videotapes, high-end production tapes, recordable LaserDiscs, artwork, game-production materials, full-motion video material, source code, and the Macintosh used by Marsh while creating MacVenture artwork.
The foundation’s 2024 review showed some of those surviving artifacts, including disks and tapes associated with Déjà Vu and Dracula and film containers from the production of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective.
These materials matter because ICOM worked during an era when game development was often poorly documented. Source files were overwritten, disks were discarded, companies folded, and employees moved into other industries. What remains from ICOM offers historians something more valuable than nostalgia. It provides evidence of how games were actually designed, drawn, filmed, programmed, ported, and produced.
ICOM Simulations’ Place in Video Game History
ICOM Simulations is easy to underestimate if its history is reduced to Shadowgate.
Its larger importance comes from repeatedly adapting to new forms of interaction.
TMQ Software worked across the fragmented personal-computer market and produced both applications and development tools. ICOM then recognized that the Macintosh mouse and windows could change the way players communicated with an adventure game. Déjà Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate, and Déjà Vu II transformed commands that once had to be typed into actions that could be selected, clicked, and manipulated visually.
When those games needed to move beyond the Macintosh, ICOM and its partners adapted them for radically different computers and eventually for the NES.
When CD-ROM offered hundreds of megabytes instead of the tiny spaces available on floppy disks and cartridges, ICOM moved again. Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective turned live actors, filmed sets, recorded dialogue, newspapers, clues, and player investigation into an early experiment in interactive cinema.
Then the company crossed another boundary, from independent developer and publisher into the expanding world of corporate multimedia, where Viacom hoped games could extend television brands such as MTV and Nickelodeon into a new interactive market.
Not every experiment succeeded, and several promising ICOM projects never appeared at all. The company itself did not survive the decade.
Its ideas did.
The point-and-click adventure became one of the defining forms of computer gaming. Graphic inventories, selectable verbs, interactive objects, multimedia storytelling, cross-platform development, filmed performances, and the blending of games with other entertainment media all became familiar parts of the industry.
ICOM explored nearly all of them while those ideas were still being invented.
For a company that began in the early personal-computer business under the name TMQ Software, that is a considerable legacy.
Sources & Further Reading
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Video Game History Foundation Library. “ICOM Simulations.” Corporate Authority Record. Accessed October 27, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/agents/corporate_entities/363
Video Game History Foundation Library. “From Developer to Publisher.” Computer Game Developers’ Conference, May 8, 1989. Audio recording. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/21126
Zipnick, Tod. “The Japanese Manufacturers: How Successful Will They Be?” BYTE, May 1982. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/80s/Byte-1982-05.pdf
TMQ Software. “File-Fax.” Advertisement. COMPUTE!, May 1983. https://www.commodore.ca/gallery/magazines/compute/Compute-036-01.pdf
Apple Computer, Inc. “Icom Simulations, Inc.” Apple Tech Info Library, March 4, 1990, updated through 1997. https://savagetaylor.com/TIL/TIL05098.pdf
ICOM Simulations and Mindscape. Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!! Instruction Manual. 1985. https://www.virtualapple.org/docs/DejaVu-Manual.pdf
ICOM Simulations and Mindscape. Shadowgate Instruction Manual. 1987. https://www.mocagh.org/mindscape/shadowgate-manual.pdf
ICOM Simulations. Shadowgate Reference and Technical Support Documentation. https://www.mocagh.org/mindscape/shadowgate-alt-manual.pdf
Mindscape, Inc. Mindscape Product Catalog. 1987. https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentation/advertisements/misc/Mindscape%20Inc.%20-%20Product%20Catalog%20%281987%29.pdf
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ICOM Simulations and Turbo Technologies. Beyond Shadowgate Instruction Manual. 1993. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/turbocd/589213-beyond-shadowgate/faqs/55763
ICOM Simulations and Sunsoft. Road Runner’s Death Valley Rally. Super Nintendo Entertainment System Instruction Manual. 1992. https://www.retrogames.cz/manualy/SNES/Road_Runner-s_Death_Valley_Rally_-SNES-_Manual.pdf
ICOM Simulations. Dracula Unleashed. Sega CD Instruction Manual. 1993. https://www.oldgames.sk/en/game/dracula-unleashed/download/5520
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Hines, Tracie Forman. “Inside the Castle: Shadowgate.” Computer Gaming World, no. 41, November 1987. https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_41.pdf
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Roelofs, Karl. “The Story of the MacVentures, Shadowgate and Its Re-imagining.” Game Developer, July 17, 2014. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/shadowgate-blog-1—the-story-of-the-macventures-shadowgate-and-its-re-imagining
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Destructoid. “Zojoi Talks Shadowgate History and Future.” 2012. Interview with David Marsh and Karl Roelofs. https://www.destructoid.com/exclusive-zojoi-talks-shadowgate-history-and-future/
Yarwood, Jack. “Shadowgate’s Co-Creator on Returning to the NES Classic 30 Years Later.” Time Extension, October 10, 2024. Interview with David Marsh. https://www.timeextension.com/features/interview-shadowgates-co-creator-on-returning-to-the-nes-classic-30-years-later
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