Infocom on PDP-11

On 5/8/05, Charles <charlesmorris at direcway.com> wrote: Infidel is old enough that I can easily believe it was out for RT-11. They probably wouldn't have produced any games for it newer than about 1983 or 1984. The engine would have supported some of the later games (the small ones, known in Infocom circles as 'v3'), but I don't think they bothered to package them up. One Infidel technology tie-in... the in-game copy protection is that you get what is not described as, but is in effect, a GPS box airdropped to your character, then you go out in the desert with a map (included in the game packaging) and use the GPS to walk to the 'X' on the map. If you don't have the real paper map, your character dies of thirst before spending more than about 4-5 turns in the desert. Infocom spent a lot of time, effort, and money on these items (and at $30-$40 MSRP per game, they needed some way to encourage purchase over piracy). I have all the old game, either in the original boxed form, some folios (especially the Commodore-64 editions printed by Commodore), and the later compilations sets like "The Lost Treasures of Infocom". I do not have any of the really cool first-edition wierd boxes like the flying saucer "Starcross" package, or the plastic face "Suspended" package. I did see the flying saucer for sale at Dayton once, but they wanted more than I had in my pocket for it. -ethan (a long-time Infocom nut, and modern-day Inform developer)