Deadline — twelve hours to arrest someone Runs here
1982 · Infocom · System 6 · Mini vMac (Mac Plus) · 512×342 black and white
Guide updated September 2026
Marshall Robner is dead in his locked study and you have until eight in the evening to arrest someone for it. Everyone in the house is somewhere at every moment, doing something, whether or not you are in the room — and that is the entire design. Deadline is a simulation with a clock, not a puzzle box.
You can follow a suspect. You can wait in a room to see who comes in. You can show one person an object you found in another person's wastebasket and watch them change their story. Every command costs a minute, which means investigating one thing is choosing not to investigate another.
Boots straight into the game. You start on the South Lawn at 8:00 am; Sergeant Duffy will fetch and analyse things if you ask him.
Controls
| Type + Return | Everything. This is a parser game. |
| ASK <person> ABOUT <thing> | The core interrogation verb |
| SHOW <thing> TO <person> | Where the case actually breaks open |
| WAIT FOR <person> | Pass time until someone arrives |
| SAVE / RESTORE | Save inside the emulated Mac. Essential here. |
Activision owns Infocom's catalogue and still exists. Deadline has not been sold since Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces went out of print in the late 1990s and is part of no current product.
Archives
- Internet Archive — the Macintosh floppy this copy was made from.
How it works & what to expect
| Machine | Macintosh Plus, 512×342, black and white |
|---|---|
| System | The floppy's own — this disk carries the System it shipped with |
| Emulator | Mini vMac, compiled to WebAssembly |
| Release | 27 / serial 831005 |
| Saves | SAVE writes inside the emulated Mac, in your browser |
The evidence folder is not here. Deadline shipped in a box with a coroner's report, interview transcripts, photographs and a torn scrap of paper, and those documents carry information the disk does not. They were the copy protection and they were also part of the game.
You can finish Deadline without them — people did it in 1982 by taking notes — but it is harder, and it is fair to know that going in. Scans of the folder are easy to find if you want the full thing.
Why it is remembered
It invented the genre for computers. Before Deadline, Infocom made fantasy and science fiction. This was the first mystery, the first game with a cast of characters who had their own schedules, and the first to be sold with a box of physical evidence — a format Infocom reused for years afterwards.
The characters run whether you watch or not. Mrs Robner makes a phone call at a particular time. Someone visits the house. Something is disposed of. Miss a moment and you miss it: there is no scripted scene waiting for you to arrive.
You can arrest the wrong person. The game lets you, and then tells you what actually happened. Most adventure games of the period would simply refuse; Deadline treats a wrong accusation as a real ending.
Getting started
Search the study first, then the grounds under the study window. Ask Sergeant Duffy to analyse anything you find — that is what he is for, and the lab results take real in-game time to come back, so send things early.
Interrogate everyone about everyone. ASK MRS ROBNER ABOUT GEORGE is a different question from ASK GEORGE ABOUT MRS ROBNER, and the contradictions between the two are the case.
Save constantly, and save into different slots. Twelve hours pass quickly, and the most common way to lose is to reach eight o'clock with a strong suspicion and no evidence a court would accept.
Questions people ask
Is the evidence folder included?
No. Deadline shipped with a folder of physical documents that are not on the disk and never were. The game is playable without them and noticeably harder.
Is there a time limit?
Yes — twelve in-game hours, and every command you type costs a minute. That pressure is the design, not an accident of the era.
Can I accuse the wrong person?
Yes, and the game will let you do it and then tell you what really happened. A wrong arrest is an ending, not an error message.
Do I need to know the Infocom parser?
It helps. Short imperative sentences work best, and ASK X ABOUT Y and SHOW X TO Y are the two verbs the whole game runs on.
Can I save?
Yes. Type SAVE. Saves live inside the emulated Macintosh in your browser, so return in the same browser.
Who wrote it?
Marc Blank, one of Infocom's founders and a co-author of the original mainframe Zork.
Put Deadline on your own site
Free, no permission needed and no account. Paste this where you want the machine to appear; it brings its own emulator and asks nothing of your page.
<iframe src="https://macemu.com/embed/deadline/"
width="512" height="342"
style="border:0;max-width:100%"
allowfullscreen
title="Deadline"></iframe>Sized to this title's real screen. How embedding works.
