Deadline was Infocom’s first non-Zork game. Instead of collecting treasures from a series of disjointed environments, the player is trying to solve a murder mystery. It’s notable for being the first game to incorporate “feelies” in the form of witness testemony required to beat the game, but not represented within the text of the program. In addition to saving space on disk, it also served as a form of copy protection.
Deadline is also notable for its scheduled use of NPCs; for the first time, in an interactive fiction game, the other characters would move around of their own accord as you played.
It is a difficult game that has a lot of the playability issues common to early text adventures. There are no mazes, no sudden and unfair deaths, but you will have to play it often enough to have an idea of everyone’s schedules before you can beat the game and solve the mystery.
And here I am, narrating it for you as I play.