~3 minute readMARKETALK: Reviews
Deadline
Deadline. By David Lebling and Marc Blank. A millionaire philanthropist has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his library. You, the chief of detectives, have received a letter from the attorney of the deceased requesting that you be present at the reading of the will and have a look around while you're there. There is also the matter of the possible existence of a new will, made by the dear departed immediately prior to his depeirture, but subsequently, shall we say . . . misplaced.
You are armed with an inspector's casebook, excerpts of suspect interrogations, the report of the medical examiner, and a packet of "tablets found near the body" (physical evidence).
If the Mystery Writers of America gave an award for Best Fiction in Software, Deadline would win in a walk. Of course, it has little competition, but besides being a well-written program (with a vocabulary of more than six hundred words, full-sentence commands) , it is well written. This is an elegant mystery, with its roots in Agatha Christie rather than Mickey Spillane. Virtually all the suspects have you, the detective, outclassed by a mile in poise, class, and resourcefulness, and they love to let you know it in a number of subtle ways. You are bound to feel more like Lieutenant Columbo than Nick or Nora Charles as you muddle about these haunts of the very rich.
The parameters of your investigation are the entire house and grounds, and the authors have loaded the whole estate into their program, down to the last garden hoe, toothbrush, and ancestral portrait. It's a real place, and every object in it is really there. It is a big program, though its speed (machine language) belies its bulk. Its sentence-comprehension ability can require painstaking prompts on the placement of the verb in relation to the subject, and results in an occasional non sequitur response, but once you get the hang of it, things can become rather chatty. If the program can't answer, it always tells you why, and it demonstrates a laconic wit in anticipating a lot of the sillier commands that may float into your head during the frustrating passages of the game.
Those passages are many. It's easy to feel lost and helpless in Deadline. There is no treasure; you have no weapons, no adversaries, and no quest â save for the truth and evidence to back it up. Your surroundings are of the familiar, mundane world and are largely inert; it's totally up to you to make sense of the world in which you find yourself.
The disciplines required in Deadline are like those of no other adventure. You don't get to see a point score mount encouragingly, and you can't even know if you're on the right track. You need to have a real grasp of deductive reasoning and a feel for minutiae. Linear thinking and direct action will get you zip. Your success is dependent on how strong a case you can make based on your accumulated evidence.
The variables for subsequent plays of the game are somewhat restricted â the facts of the murder, the method, and the culprit don't change â but even though it's always the same mystery, you are not likely to get a conviction your first time through, and you'll have to go back and reconstruct events again, searching for the evidence that will clinch your case. Therein lies the variety of Deadline. For anyone who ever loved a mystery â and who has a couple days free â it's indispensible.
Deadline, by David Lebling and Marc Blank, Infocom (55 Wheeler Street, Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-492-1031). $49.95.
This article appeared in
Softalk
Aug 1982
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