The Lurking Horror

The Lurking Horror
Amiga cover art for The Lurking Horror
Developer(s)	Infocom
Publisher(s)	Infocom
Designer(s)	Dave Lebling
Engine	ZIL
Platform(s)	Amiga, Amstrad CPC/PCW, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Commodore 64/128, Macintosh, MS-DOS.
Release	Release 203: May 6, 1987 Release 219: September 12, 1987 Release 221: September 18, 1987
Genre(s)	Interactive fiction
Mode(s)	Single-player

Release 203: May 6, 1987 Release 219: September 12, 1987

The Lurking Horror is an interactive fiction game released by Infocom in 1987. The game was written by Dave Lebling and inspired by the horror fiction writings of H. P. Lovecraft (including his Cthulhu Mythos). Like most of Infocom's games, it was released for several platforms simultaneously thanks to the Z-machine.

The original release included versions for DOS, the Apple II, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit family and Commodore 64. Later, it was ported to the Amiga with the addition of sound effects, making it the first title with that feature. The effects would play at appropriate times in the game in an effort to intensify the horror atmosphere. This marked one of the few major additions to the Z-machine with the exception of graphics; traditionally, Infocom had eschewed such changes in favor of expanding the parser capacity and overall size of game files. It was Infocom's 26th game; Infocom rated it as "Standard" in terms of difficulty. Lurking Horror was the only horror game ever released by Infocom.

The game starts with the player trying to finish a term paper at G.U.E. Tech, a large MIT-like American university. The player has braved a snowstorm to travel to the school's computer lab to work on the report. The document is now mangled beyond repair, however; with the help of a hacker, the player finds that the file has been partially overwritten by the Department of Alchemy's files. Although the game begins as a quest to try to salvage the term paper, alarming events soon unfold, revealing a powerful evil within the school's depths.