[aeberbach]

Did you read the article? Z-machine wasn't the cause of the graphical games failure. By the time Infocom ventured into graphics the games division was hamstrung by a focus on the business division (and their database product Cornerstone). They just didn't have the resources to compete. The graphical game Fooblitzky had its own issues, including that graphics quality was tailored to the lowest common denominator allowing the game to ship on multiple platforms as all of the text adventures had. This kind of thinking may have come from the write-once-ship-everywhere approach of Z-machine but it was a failure of strategy rather than technology.

The virtual machine approach did have grave consequences for Cornerstone - performance just wasn't as good as the competition. While it allowed a full-featured database product to ship on just one floppy it made performance so sluggish that one test abandoned testing their larger datasets after horrible performance with the smaller data.