1989 Accolade
Platform: IBM PC
A CIA Agent is viciously murdered in a top class New York Hotel and suddenly you’re the number 1 suspect. You’ll find yourself thrust into an ingenious plot by a murderous clutch of financiers with world domination on their mind. You have only 24 hours to find the Deadlock files — the key to proving your innocence and exposing the conspiracy. Can you clear your name? Can you save the nation?
That was the blurb from advertising for a lost title called Conspiracy: The Deadlock Files (no relation to the Deadlock strategy games released years later by Accolade), a title which was an early VGA adventure game from Accolade, which claimed to be the first “fully digitised adventure game with 256 colour video graphics”.
It was expected to be a “six disk” game and would support Tandy, CMS and AdLib sound. Conspiracy would also support CGA and Hercules, and would require 512KB RAM. It was expected to retail for $49.95 and was due to be released in the third quarter of 1989.
The game was featured in various magazines of the time and was billed as Accolade’s first graphics adventure and promised over 500 digitized photographs of New York City landmarks such as Trump Tower, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Wall Street, the Empire State Building and Liberty Island. It was marketed as the first fully digitised adventure game, offering a “real people, real combat” approach where the player would face off against terrorists, the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, and even New York police.
Gameplay also included a typical parser-style interface with commands like Examine, Take, Drop, Use, Talk, Open, Close, Push, Pull. The story revolved around tracking down seven Deadlock Files within 24 hours to clear your name and stop a plot to overthrow the U.S. government.
According to Accolade’s Shelly Safir, the project stemmed from technology developed by a “young man” that could deliver results on PC comparable to CD-I titles of the time. A major hurdle was compression, with the team devising a method to fit the digitized photography into a six-disk package while still running on a modest 512KB RAM PC.
The retail price was set at $49.95, though Accolade also ran a direct-order promotion for $54.95 bundled with a free clue book (valued at $12.95). Safir described Conspiracy as “a big step in the direction of interactive movies,” positioning it as not just a game but a glimpse into the future of computer entertainment.
However, the game would completely disappear off the face of the earth without it seems any reason for its cancellation. So what happened exactly? How far did the game get, and can anything of it be found today? If you know anything more about the title, please do get in touch!
With thanks to Spalls Hurgenson for the heads up and information about the title, Archive.org and Abandonware Magazines France for the scans and Abandonsocios.org for references.
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