When Stephen gets the article transferred to the new Brass Lantern site, I'll provide a link to the article. Tom Mage is primarily known for his Ultima page , but he does have some Infocom items for sale or trade.
This last item is the nine of the Zork-related text adventures that appears briefly for sale on Amazon. The also have information on the two Lost Treasures of Infocom collections. Any name will work. Then type :zork to play. You can also try :games;adv and :games;adv It is worth noting that the versions introduce themselves by saying "Welcome to Dungeon"; the versions say "Welcome to Zork". Of course the "Dungeon" versions still mention "Zork" in many places within the game.
The files are dated no later than early ; most are The documentation has been gathered from the Internet Archive , the collection at frobnitz. Note that. This version is dated Jan 7 It was found within the minizork-r2 source directory see below. The second is written in C and dated March The comments say "Zinn Computer Company, for Infocom", implying that the work was outsourced.
The directory includes. From this historical repo. A handful of other utilities are included, including zsplit , zglue , zspix , and zsymtest. These appear to have to do with packaging game files onto disk for specific platforms.
A third, earlier version can be found as part of the ZIL source repository above. This is MDL code dated "Jan 18 ". I'm not sure if it can be run independently of the rest of the ZIL toolset. The disk itself was not an original and did not come with a label or packaging, but it seems to have been the early Personal Software release. We have two game files labelled r22, Mac and non-Mac. Neither of them seems to correspond to the most current source.
I've labelled the current source "infidel-rlater" for lack of better information. We have two version of the r18 game file.
Many game file variations tagged with platform names "tandy", "coco", etc. This is no doubt due to the difficulties of making the sonar display status window work across different screen sizes.
Note that many source files were deleted between r79 and the "rlater" version, so the GitHub repo error is particularly noticeable. The patch archive contains two further hacks are which are identical to r59 s except for release and serial; I have omitted these. A conundrum, Watson. Four source directories appear. The base and -sound directories differ in only a few lines of zil.
The -nosound directory has nosound. The -ss directory is substantially different from the others; the header timestamps imply that it is an early development version. For what it's worth, the included version note says:. Many alpha and beta game files. Also two demo versions, which could be considered "Mini-Zork Zero". Note the early z5 version whose release number 46 is out of sequence. We have two source directories which appear to match this version. Originally this was one source directory containing ".
The sampler appears to have gone through several combinations of games. Comment from the r8 source:. Wealthy tycoon, tireless worker, and a bit of a cold fish. It seems that no one was truly close to him. The apparent evidence points to suicide, but what will the protagonist have to say about that? Coates: Robner's attorney. He has misgivings about the police findings and has requested a second opinion from you, the local Chief of Dectectives.
Robner: Frustrated by the lack of closure the detective's presence represents. She is curt in her interactions and perhaps less sad than one might expect. Dunbar: Mr. Robner's assistant and the last known person to see him alive.
Baxter: Mr. Robner's partner for several years. Despite this, they were never close. During questioning, Mr. Baxter observes that Robner often had loud arguments with his son, George. Rourke: The Robners' talkative--and perhaps gossipy--housemaid. George Robner: the Robners' son. He did not cooperate with police interview, instead walking out. His relationship with his father was allegedly contentious and difficult. McNabb: The Robners' groundskeeper.
While he knows little of the Robners' family life, he is intimately familiar with the property itself, its gardens and lawns. The deceased's attorney, Warren Coates, has asked that you review the case. Presumably, given Robner's status in the community, you would not say no, even if you wished to. At that time, the case is closed, one way or another. Hence, PM is the detective's Deadline. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the primary objects of interaction are the the characters themselves.
At crucial times, though, the environment plays a crucial role. You can follow characters, hide from them, confront them with objects found within the environment. Additionally, you can ask your assistant, Sergeant Duffy, to have physical evidence analyzed. As in any murder case without a witness, hard physical evidence will be required for a conviction. That's right.
Beginning with Deadline , I am adding a new item for consideration: the material shipped with the game disk, including the packaging, the manuals, and any other items included with the package. Such things came to be known as "feelies". These documents and items often served to develop a game's context within its own imagined world. In many cases, these items also provided a sort of copy protection. They were integral to the game and included required knowledge that existed outside of the computer program.
In Deadline's case, the game originally shipped in an actual folder of the sort one might expect to find housing files documenting an investigation. Within were memos, interview transcripts, a coroner's report. Even a letter requesting that you, the detective, take a second look. In fact, a small baggie with two pills-the presumed cause of death--were included in the package!
I strongly encourage you to examine both the grey box and folio editions if this interests you. None of it spoils anything. In fact, it is expected that players will read the material before starting the game. These feelies, unprecedented as they were most games just included a bare-bones manual focused on booting the game had two outstanding benefits. For a good number of years, game publishers spent more time and energy on packaging as a consequence.
I think those of us who were playing games back then might remember those times as "the good old days" in terms of physical media. Today, such care is reserved only for collector's editions. Last edited: Aug 10, Feelies : In fact, a small baggie with two pills-the presumed cause of death--were included in the package!
DiscoPizza Member. I've been feeling like starting one of the easy games soon. I had a few of them back on the C64, but the only one I ever came close to finishing was Plundered Hearts. Well holy moly, now that I read your summary I'm relatively sure I have played Deadline! I definitely didn't beat it, but that premise sounds extremely familiar. It's possible it was another "detective in a house" IF game, of course -- I feel like that's probably a whole subgenre, especially when you include modern IF -- but I think that given how much of a big-name game Deadline seems to be, being Infocom and all, this probably would have been the one I came across way back when.
I look forward to reading your thoughts about it! That's hilarious. Looking at the PDF, it looks like the pills were probably Rockets? Complete sets of feelies are probably a huge rarity already, for any game, but with edible ones in the mix I bet there're essentially no complete sets around for Deadline.
DiscoPizza said:. Last edited: Aug 9, Haven't played Deadline, looking forward to your impressions. I hope they bring back the Lost Treasures of Infocom app.
Maybe the rights-holders don't think it's worth the effort? Oct 28, I remember playing Zork and just being stunned at the time what I was doing on my C I was hooked. Within a couple years I wanted to be Infocom. I had graphing paper for mapping. I had notebooks for thoughts and ideas. I read any magazines with reviews or information on Infocom or other IF as it would be.
At one point I happened to find that a Waldenbooks I think , in a not-to-close mall sold the Invisaclue books and I was able to finally finish up a couple games as I could afford or convince my understanding mother to purchase a some of them.
I even remember how the guy at the store played Zork and asked me how far I had gotten. By the end of my C64 days I owned about a dozen of the Gray Box games. I treasured each one of them and spent too much time reading and re-reading the documentation or the clue books or examining the feelies.
I still owned them too, until a few years back when my basement flooded and the boxes that contained them were ruined and sadly went into the trash. I am led to believe that at least the microscopic space fleet escaped unharmed. Bonus: an Origin sales booklet,a book on Ultima by the legendary Shay Addams, and the Interplay 10th Anniversary manual: Spoiler: Some old manuals and stuff.
All the games run in a VM the "Z-Machine" so when you port one, you've ported them all. Since Zork Zero part of the still on-sale as part of the Zork Collection , runs in the last version of the Z-Machine v6 , there's nothing to port for PC's.
There's a perfectly fine freeware Z-code interpreter Frotz available in the app stores, so there are no meaningful technical incompatibilities to overcome with modern phones.
I don't know why they don't just release them to public domain. They aren't going to do anything with them, the documentation and hints are already public domain, and There's a github repository for Infocom source code, even. Nice stash! I was living that C64 life, too. And I also loved the documentation and invisiclues. They are still fun to look at today.
I often dreamed of being an Implementor in those days, and took my share of notes, too. I guess that thanks to Inform I actually could write an IF game. Who knows, maybe after I replay all these games I'll be suitably inspired.
That is a shame about your basement flooding. It'd be hard to say goodbye to that stuff. I actually gave up a lot of my games on purpose, if you can believe that. When I went off to college, I had no idea how much those games would mean to me over the years. I've decided that I'm going to check eBay every once in a while, see what's there.
I look forward to talking about your faves! Deadline , Part 2 On Difficulty : Deadline is a very difficult game. Those who have solved Zork I and Zork II will find that it exercises different parts of the brain, although such players may be better equipped to win occasional fights with the parser. It is virtually impossible to beat the game on first try because of the game's implementation of chronological sequence. If the player misses an opportunity or event, there is no way to catch it a second time.
Deadline is more like real life: sometimes "you just had to be there. I'll be pointing out such cases as I talk about Deadline. Playing Deadline If the player has experienced either or both of the Zork games, they will soon notice a significant difference in Deadline 's "status line. In Deadline , the status bar instead shows current room and time.
This has important consequences. First, the clock is a way to keep track of in-game events: when, for instance, George Robner will move from his room to the kitchen. Second, the absence of a score means that the player must determine for themselves how well they are doing.
The game itself does not give helpful indications increases to score to communicate whether an action will lead to victory or not. Deadline has a number of red herrings and dead ends, and the player will not know whether they are headed down the wrong path until they exhaust the available evidence or make an arrest.
Making an arrest is the one way to get concrete feedback on your progress. If the arrest does not end in a conviction, there will often be a supervisor's comment suggesting why the protagonist did not build a successful case. If you're stuck, don't be afraid to make a bad arrest, just to see if it gives you any clues saving first, of course. So at AM, our detective-protagonist arrives at the Robner estate.
They have 12 hours to solve the case if evidence of murder is found. The game has assumed that the player has reviewed all feelies carefully, as they may suggest initial avenues of inquiry. On first playthrough, the player will likely visit the scene of the suicide. This is the library in which Mr. Robner was found dead. It is decorated in a simple but comfortable style. Robner obviously spent a great deal of time here.
A large executive desk is in front of the large balcony window, which lies at the north of the room. A telephone is sitting on the desk. The east side of the room is composed of three large bookshelf units in which are numerous volumes covering a wide range of interests.
The floor is covered with wall-to-wall carpeting. The massive oak door which blocked the only entrance to the room has been forcibly knocked off its hinges and is lying by the doorway. Beside the desk is a large collapsible tray. Sitting on the tray is a bowl containing a white powdery substance. Alongside the desk is a wicker wastepaper basket, inside of which are some crumpled papers.
Lying on the floor, overturned, is a beautiful saucer. You are greeted warmly by a man named Laird, according to his Activision nametag. He mentions that they are having an open house, and invites you to look around in the rooms that are open. Will the Circle be unbroken?
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