8.4 /10 1 Votes
Engine ZIL Initial release date 1987 Designer Douglas Adams Genre Interactive fiction | 4.2/5 My Abandonware Mode(s) Single player Developer Infocom Publisher Infocom | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Release date(s) Release 86: February 12, 1987
Release 116: June 2, 1987 Platforms Apple II, DOS, Macintosh operating systems, Atari ST, MS-DOS, Commodore 128, AmigaOS Similar Infocom games, Interactive fiction games | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Bureaucracy is an interactive fiction computer game released by Infocom in 1987, scripted by popular comic science fiction author Douglas Adams. It is Infocom's twenty-fourth game.
Contents
Setting
The player is challenged to confront a long and complicated series of bureaucratic hurdles resulting from a recent change of address. Mail isn't being delivered, bank accounts are inaccessible, and nothing is as it should be. The game includes a measure of simulated blood pressure which rises when "frustrating" events happen and lowers after a period of no annoying events. Once a certain blood pressure level is reached, the player suffers an aneurysm and the game ends.
While undertaking the seemingly simple task of retrieving misdirected mail, the player encounters a number of bizarre characters, including an antisocial hacker, a paranoid weapons enthusiast, and a tribe of Zalagasan cannibals. At the same time, they must deal with impersonal corporations, counterintuitive airport logic, and a hungry llama.
Feelies
Among the extra items, which Infocom called feelies, in the Bureaucracy game package are:
Reception
Game reviewers Hartley and Patricia Lesser complimented the game in their "The Role of Computers" column in Dragon #124 (1987), calling it "an outrageous journey through red tape that puts you directly in the middle of a bureaucratic muddle so convoluted that you can’t help but laugh." Jerry Pournelle named Bureaucracy as his game of the month for October 1987, stating that he and Larry Niven became "engrossed". The game sold 40,000 copies.
Tagline
Everything goes wrong in this hilarious battle with the powers that be!