On planet Allansia, our hero travels across the Northern Borderlands without meeting a single soul. Until one night, he is wakened from his sleep only to witness the final words of a dying dwarf called Bigleg. His mission to take a legendary weapon of war to Gillibran, the king of dwarves, at the edge of Darkwood, failed. It has been stolen in an ambush. Without this weapon, the dwarf kingdom of Stonebridge is in danger from warmongering trolls. Bigleg promises our nameless hero great riches if he can find the war hammer again and bring it to its rightful owner. Then he dies right under our eyes.
Infocom takes us back to the times of Cold War, in a classic tale of spies the two blocks collide, and only you can stop an evil plot before time runs out.
That is, the authors throw you in the role of three of the said spies, who find themselves in a small imaginary country near the west-east border, where a high ranking ambassador is going to be assassinated.
Now, I would bet that at least half of our readers don't even remember the Cold War firsthand. When the game was released in the late 1980s, it was still very much alive, though, in spite of the slowly developing, but still very fragile attempts at Perestroika and Glasnost.
…the Oscar for the most far-fetched use of a mega licence goes to: First Blood Part II!
The insignificance of the computer game industry compared to more established media in the mid-80s is illustrated easily by Angelsoft's licencing deals. They managed to score at least three of the biggest movie names of the time: Indiana Jones, James Bond and… Rambo – whose second part, in retrospect, has turned out to be something like the pinnacle of the politically ultra-reactionary body cinema so popular at the time; a movie which spends 85 of its 96 minutes with restless shooting. What better way to adapt it than a text adventure?