Infidel (video game)

Plot

Infocom intended Infidel to be the first of a "Tales of Adventure" series. Among the feelies in the package are several documents that set up the backstory. The player's character is a self-styled adventurer and fortune hunter. He's bitter because he thinks his boss, Craige, should treat him as a partner instead of an assistant. A call comes in while Craige is out checking equipment: a woman, Rose Ellington, wants to sponsor an expedition to discover the pyramid that her archeologist father never found. Egotistical and greedy for fame, the assistant tells Rose that he's capable of taking the job and decides to cut out Craige altogether.

In 1916, Dr. Ellington came into possession of a 5000-year-old fragment of pottery covered with hieroglyphics. (Conveniently for the text-only game, these runes look strangely like ASCII characters.) After years of painstaking research, Ellington managed to decipher a portion of the text, which indicated the general location of a pyramid that no one had heard of before. He managed to organize a modest expedition to the area in 1920, but found nothing before he died except a small block of limestone bearing the same style of hieroglyphics. According to the partial translation he made, the new fragment spoke of a queen and great riches. When Howard Carter discovered King Tut's tomb a few years later, Dr. Ellington's widow figured that someone had found the pyramid her husband had been looking for. She stowed the papers and artifacts away and forgot all about them. Rose found them in the early 1980s after her mother's death and did some preliminary fact-checking. The pyramid indicated by her father's papers is nowhere near Tut's. In fact, no pyramids have ever been discovered in the area Dr. Ellington was investigating. Rose is by no means a rich woman—she only wants someone to give her father the recognition he deserves—so it'll be a modest expedition. But it sure sounds like the perfect chance for an opportunistic soldier-of-fortune to make a name for himself.

It soon becomes apparent that this adventuring stuff is harder than it looks. The "navigation box", a gadget that seems to be a crude forerunner of a Global Positioning System unit, is irreparably damaged. A new one is ordered, since locating the pyramid is impossible without it, but weeks slip by waiting for the delivery. The food supplies spoil. The locals recruited to dig are becoming increasingly discontent and demand more money. Terrified of losing control, the would-be adventurer commands the men to continue digging aimlessly, even trying to browbeat them into laboring on a holy day.

As the game begins, the player awakens to realize that he has been drugged by his men, who have stolen most of the equipment and abandoned the camp. All the food and water are gone, and the player has no idea how to get back to civilization. He may very well have been left to die in the barren desert. But the navigation box finally arrives, convincing him that everything will work out as long as he can find the pyramid! Once he does, of course, there is the small matter of the traps the Egyptians set to protect their treasures from plunderers like him...

After the player manages to survive through numerous challenges, many reminiscent of the challenges faced by Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, he collects several artifacts, presumably of great value. At the very end of the game, he finds the ultimate artifact of the pyramid. However, as he reaches for it, the pyramid collapses around him and the game ends.

Many players felt robbed by this unhappy ending, even for such a greedy and prideful character. However, it is possible to complete the game with a nearly perfect score, return to the entrance of the pyramid, and quit the game. Although there is no ending screen to congratulate the player on a job well done, some consider this player-fashioned ending a more rewarding one.

Development

A Harvard University Egyptologist assisted in game design. One of the multiple endings was changed during playtesting because players thought that it rewarded an ethnic bias.

Feelies

Although the inclusion of feelies, or extra items in the game's package, was a relatively new concept at the time of Infidel's release, a rich array of documents was provided:

Feelies were a way to prevent copying of a game in earlier video game generations. The developers would include information needed to play the game in the feelies, which at the time were much more difficult to copy than the games themselves.

Reception

Softline called Infidel "diabolical ... more death traps per square foot in the game than there are in Raiders of the Lost Ark". PC Magazine rated the game 12.0 points out of 12. It praised the sophisticated text parser, and described creator Michael Berlyn's prose as "exciting and fast-paced, with occasional bits of humor". Scorpia, normally a fan of Infocom games, so disliked Infidel that she never mentioned it in Computer Gaming World. She denounced the game during an online discussion with Berlyn, however: "I did not like the premise of the story. I did not like the main character. I did not like the ending. I felt it was a poor choice to have a character like that in an Infocom game, since after all, regardless of the main character in the story, *I* am the only one who is really playing the game, really solving the puzzles".