Dead Zone

• Title — Dead Zone • Developer — Sunsoft • Publisher — Sunsoft • Programmer — Yoshiaki Komada • Artist — Kenji Mori • Producer — Kouichi Kitazumi • Composer — Naoki Kodaka • Released — November 20, 1986 • Genre — Adventure • Modes — Single-player • Platforms — Famicom Disk System

In the space calendar 0385, the Earth suffers from overpopulation and humans start to build space colonies. Cark, the protagonist, works for the Earth Federation's space development office. He is a brilliant engineer in space physics and is working for the Sirius third planet colony. He gets engaged to his girlfriend Mary, but they have to postpone their wedding. Five months later, Cark, accompanied by his robot Carry, decides to visit Mary and prepare the ceremony at last, but when he arrives at the space station where she is in, everything is quiet. Then a beam of light hits him. He wakes up sometimes later, inside a sort of underground graveyard, with pieces of dismantled robots surrounding him (including Lionex from Sunsoft's unreleased Nintendo Vs. Series title of the same name).

The player proceeds through the game by choosing from a selection of text menu commands. Like any traditional digital comic/text adventure games, a large view shows the surroundings. The bottom of the screen proposes simple action commands, like see, take or push, but the game is entirely in Japanese (although it uses katakana exclusively). One of the original features of the game is to use real sampled sound in some places, which was unusual for the time. A complete English fan translation patch was released in November 2019.