🧭 THE ARCHIVES

Quote of the day

The ship rocks from the force of multiple explosions. The lights go out, and you feel a sudden drop in pressure accompanied by a loud hissing. Too bad you weren't in the escape pod...

-- Planetfall

Factoid of the day

In Zork III, an earthquake occurs after about 150 turns. If you haven't completed a certain part of the story before the earthquake, the game cannot be finished. Frustratingly, there is no obvious way to know when the game has been soft-locked in this manner.

*Zork placed millions under its spell... The spell is yet to be broken.*
Mar 1996

BYTE, v7(10)

~1 minute read

Oct 1982

What's New?

Deadline

Murder Mystery

Deadline is a murder mystery game created by Infocom, developer of the game Zork. Deadline casts you in the role of a detective challenged to solve a murder within a 12-hour deadline. To help you nab the culprit, Deadline comes with a dossier filled with evidence critical to your assignment: lab reports, physical evidence discovered near the victim, fingerprints, interviews with suspects, an 8-by-10 photo of the scene of the crime, and a detective's manual. Deadline uses an English-based vocabulary of more than 600 words for a conversational interaction between you and the computer. Actual playing time may run 20 or more hours, according to the company.

Deadline costs $49.95 and will run on a variety of computers, including the Apple, the IBM Personal Computer, and the NEC PC-8000. A version for CP/M-based systems and the PDP-l I costs $59.95. Deadline is manufactured by Infocom Inc., 55 Wheeler St., Cambridge, MA 02138, (617) 492-1031.

Circle 532 on inquiry card.

These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.