Deadline

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Description

You have 12 hours to solve the murder of Mr. Marshall Robner. If it was a murder... Mr Robner was found locked in his library, dead -- from a lethal dosage of anti-depressants. Friends and family are calling this a suicide of depressed wealthy industrialist. As Chief of Detectives, you find something just doesn't smell right about this case. You go out on a quest to find a suspect, his motive, method, and opportunity.

Difficulty Level: Expert

Screenshots

Promo Images

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Alternate Titles

• "Who Killed Marshall Robner?" -- Working title
• "Was It Murder?" -- Working title
• "Deadline: An INTERLOGIC Mystery" -- Tag-lined title

Part of the Following Group

• Theme: Law enforcement

User Reviews

A great mystery and game	DOS	Ingold (134)
The one that broke the mold	DOS	Tony Van (2855)
An Early Infocom Game	PC Booter	rs2000 (15)

Critic Reviews

Computer Games	Atari 8-bit	Sep, 1983	A	100
Zzap!	Commodore 64	Oct, 1985	93 out of 100	93
Info	Commodore 64	Sep, 1983		90
Amiga Power	Amiga	Oct, 1991	87 out of 100	87
Amiga Format	Amiga	Nov, 1992	73 out of 100	73
Just Games Retro	DOS	Sep 24, 2007		70
SPAG	DOS	Mar 15, 2000	6.9 out of 10	69
Amiga Format	Amiga	Oct, 1991	42 out of 100	42
Softline	Apple II	Mar, 1982	Unscored	Unscored
Computer Gaming World (CGW)	Atari 8-bit	Jul, 1982	Unscored	Unscored

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Trivia

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

Related Web Sites

• Deadline on Wikipedia (more information about the game)
• Deadline's wikipedia page (Here you can find all sorts of info about the game.)
• Infocom homepage (At this site you can find information on ALL of Infocom's interactive games, Infocom related articles, sample transcripts, InvisiClue hints, walkthroughs, maps and information on buying Infocom games today.)
• The Commodore Zone (All about Deadline - introduction, images, related links and comments area.)
• The Infocom Gallery (High-quality scans of the grey box package and manual of Deadline.)