Infidel

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Infidel
Logo Infidel (Infocom) .jpg
Studio Infocom
Publisher Infocom
Senior Developer Michael Berlyn
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 September 16, 1983
platform Amstrad CPC , Apple II , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore Amiga , MS-DOS , TRS-80 , TI-99 / 4A , Mac OS
Game engine ZIL
genre adventure
Game mode Single player
control keyboard
medium diskette
language English
copy protection Enclosure referencing ("Feelies")

Infidel (English for unbelievers ) is a text adventure from Infocom from 1983.

action

The player is an adventurer who originally worked as the assistant to the archaeologist Craige in Egypt in the 1980s in search of pyramids. Disappointed by the lack of recognition on the part of Craige, he betrays his superiors by secretly accepting an order from an archaeologist's daughter to find a pyramid marked on mysterious documents and hastily assembling his own expedition. During this expedition the player is abandoned by his team after some (partly self-inflicted) setbacks and wakes up at the beginning of the game in the largely cleared excavation camp, without aids and far from any civilization. The aim of the game is first the survival of the player, then later finding and exploring the mysterious pyramid that houses the tomb of a queen. The pyramid was trapped by the queen's priests to deter grave robbers. In the second of his triumph, when the queen's sarcophagus is opened at the end of the game, the player is buried alive by one of these traps.

Game principle and technology

Infidel is a text adventure, which means there are no graphic elements. Environment and events are displayed as screen text and the player's actions are also entered as text via the keyboard. The parser of Infidel understands about 600 words, almost as many as the parser of Zork dominated. In contrast to other Infocom games, there are no non-player characters (NPCs) in Infidel , which can be explained by the setting (exploring a pyramid for the first time).

Infidel's early publications contained a fictitious expedition diary, a letter to the client, the translation of a hieroglyphic fragment by the client's father and a map of the area around the excavation camp as enclosures ("Feelies") . These supplements were referenced in the game and therefore represent a copy protection, for example, the card enclosed with the game must be used to localize the pyramid.

Production notes

Infidel goes back to an authors' meeting at Infocom, at which it was decided to develop adventure novel -style games after several successful titles in the fantasy and science fiction genres . The genre has seen a revival since the hit movie of Raiders of the Lost Ark and thus seemed commercially promising. The first game in the planned Tales of Adventure series was to take place in a previously unexplored Egyptian pyramid; the working title was Pyramid . Michael Berlyn was entrusted with drawing up the plot. In order to create a believable game world, Berlyn contacted the Egyptology PhD student Patricia Fogleman from Harvard University , who helped with the design of the location and the consistent implementation of ancient Egyptian mythology and is co-authored. Berlyn himself was dissatisfied with the result; In an interview he stated that he downright hated the game (" There are a lot of personal reasons for my disgust (I hate the game, myself) over the whole Infidel project "). Among the first ten games by Infocom, Infidel was the one with the lowest sales figures; fewer than 50,000 copies were sold.

Other titles in the Tales of Adventure series were Cutthroats (1984) and Seastalker (1984).

In 2019, the source code of the game was published on the software development repository GitHub .

reception

In an essay about Infidel , the US ludologist Jimmy Maher explains that the game, with its lack of NPCs and the continuously static environment, differs significantly from the usually dynamic game worlds of Infocom. The specialty of the game lies rather in the protagonist of the game. While there is typically a latent racism inherent in the adventure genre, which characterizes the white adventurer as superior to foreign civilizations, the protagonist in Infidel is an unsympathetic type, who at the end of the game is punished for his selfish and destructive behavior. In the 2010 documentary Get Lamp , Berlyn said that Infidel was the first video game to tell players "who they are and why they are like that and slap them in the face for that very reason." According to Maher, Infidel essentially raises the design question of whether the player should take on a role in a text adventure and follow it or should help determine the story themselves. Berlyn had chosen the former route and was surprised by numerous negative feedback; In Get Lamp he stated that the reactions of fans and media within the Infocom company had triggered a process of rethinking, based on the knowledge that players wanted less a literary experience than a game in which they could find themselves. In a retrospective of 2011, the retro blog Gaming After 40 praised the attention to detail, the precisely worked out puzzles and the unconventional approach of choosing an antihero for the player figure, but criticized the sometimes stubborn parser and the fact that modern interpreters with proportional character sets use the ASCII graphics would be hard to read. The contemporary American magazine Computer Games rated the game as "difficult" and praised its "excellent prose" as well as the rudimentary experiments with ASCII graphics, which added a "new dimension" to the genre. The Computer Gaming World praised its package layout as "outstanding". The general setting of the game and the clever handling of the subject of hieroglyphs were positively highlighted in the press. The low psychological depth compared to previous Infocom games, the in some places inadequate parser and the sometimes spartan room and object descriptions were criticized. The end polarized: many critics found it abrupt and disappointing, some as realistic.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Resonant.org: Infidel Fact Sheet ( Memento from December 25, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ a b c Filfre.net: Infidel. Retrieved April 9, 2017 .
  3. ↑ GitHub.com: Infidel by Mike Berlyn (Infocom). Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Gaming After 40: Adventure of the Week: Infidel (1983). Retrieved April 9, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Computer Games Vol. 3 No. 2, p. 53: Infidel. Retrieved March 31, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Computer Gaming World Vol. 4 No. 1, February 1984, p. 9: Infidel. Retrieved April 9, 2017 . (PDF, 20 MB)
  7. ↑ Antic Vol. 3, No. August 4, 1984
  8. ↑ IFDB-Reviews