Deadline

Bug

A bug in the program made it possible to follow a certain set of instructions that resulted in Ms. Dunbar committing suicide while another Ms. Dunbar continued to walk around the house. Upon hearing the gunshot fired by the now-dead Ms. Dunbar, the alive version of Ms. Dunbar executed her AI script faithfully and ran into the room to see what had happened. This led to an amusing exchange with the game parser:

examine dunbar

Which Ms. Dunbar do you mean: Ms. Dunbar, or the body of Ms. Dunbar?

Characters

One of the characters in Deadline, Sargent Duffy, also appears in Infocom's later mystery games The Witness, and Suspect.

Difficulty

Infocom gave Deadline a difficulty rating of "Expert", largely due to the abundance of evidence and false leads to be sorted out within a short timespan.

Extras

This was Infocom's third game but the first one to include "feelies". The feelies include typed interviews, 3 pills in a small bag (found at the crime scene), a photograph of the crime scene, the coroners report, and a note from the family attorney.

References

Infocom's famous 69,105 number is used in this game to refer to the serial number on the pharmacy label on the tablets.

Statistics

(From The New Zork Times Vol.3 No.2 Spring 1984)

Some statistics about Deadline: * Apparent number of rooms (those seen by the player): 49 * Number of rooms: 51 (for various arcane programming reasons, some rooms are inaccessible to the player) * Number of different ways to die: 2 * Number of words in vocabulary: 656 * Number of takeable objects: 37

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #104 in the "150 Best Games of All Time" list

Inmformation also contributed by Nélio, Ricky Derocher, saladpuncher and Sciere