a long, long time ago one of the only places you could find MS-DOS abandonware was on Home of the Underdogs. every week I would crawl through its RPG and Adventure sections looking for the next underrated gem I had never heard of. among their “Top Dogs” were two infocom games: Circuit’s Edge and Mines of Titan.

although infocom became synonymous with text adventures/interactive fiction, it was also a publisher of graphical RPGs designed by westwood associates. these were fascinating games - a blend of dungeon crawling, text adventure, and NPC dialogues.

Circuit’s Edge is unique insofar as it is set in a futuristic middle east. the world is based on George Alec Effinger’s When Gravity Fails series, a cyberpunk setting with cybernetic implants, islam, and money. Effinger himself wrote all of the ingame text.

decades later I was finally able to buy physical copies. i always liked the cover art for circuit’s edge, and that they used artist Jean-Francois Podevin’s pre-vis sketch for the manual cover.

#infocom #rpg #dosGaming #bigboxgames