Infidel

• Title — Infidel • Developer — Infocom • Publisher — Infocom • Designer — Michael Berlyn Patricia Fogleman • Engine — Z-machine • Released — November 1, 1983 • Genre — Interactive fiction • Modes — Single-player • Platforms — Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, IBM PC, TRS-80, TI-99/4A, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST

Infocom intended Infidel to be the first of a "Tales of Adventure" series. The player's character is a self-styled adventurer and fortune hunter. The character appears to have a bitter personality as he thinks that his boss Craige should treat him as a partner instead of an assistant. Progressing in the storyline a call comes while Craige is out checking some equipment. The call is from a woman named Rose Ellington, who wants to sponsor an expedition to discover the pyramid that her archaeologist father was not able to. The player's character egoistically and hungry for attention tells the woman he is more than capable of taking the job and decides not to inform Craige about the call. In 1916, Dr. Ellington came into possession of a 5000-year-old fragment of pottery covered with hieroglyphics. After years of research, Dr. Ellington managed to decipher a portion of the text, indicating the general location of a pyramid that was not known of. The deciphered text described a queen with great riches. Later, when Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut, Rose Ellington, the daughter of the now-late Dr. Ellington, thought that someone had found the pyramid and stowed the papers and artifacts away. Rose found them in the early 1980s after her mother's death and did some preliminary fact-checking. She found out that the pyramid indicated by her father's findings was nowhere near the tomb of King Tut, and that the area Dr. Ellington was investigating had no discovered pyramids. Rose, not being financially proficient, set the expedition to be a modest one. This was the perfect opportunity for an opportunistic soldier-of-fortune to make a name for himself. However, the “Navigation Box”, a crude forerunner of a Global Positioning System, was irreparably damaged. A new one was ordered, but the delivery was delayed and the resources and the will of the local diggers was dwindling. The adventurer, desperate to control the situation, commanded the workers to dig aimlessly and even browbeat them to work 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 is 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.

During Development, the game was initially called "Pyramid", though it was only through Infocoms ad agency that they asked for a new title, as "Pyramid" seemed rather uninspired. 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. There are 40 ways for the player to die. Infidels packaging includes the following physical items: • An "Expedition Log" kept by the player's character in the weeks prior to the game beginning • An envelope containing a letter written to Rose Ellingsworth by the player's character • A rubbing and partial translation of Dr. Ellington's limestone fragment from 1920 • A roughly sketched map of the excavation area