score that other Infocom games of its time showed, the game needed a custom interpreter, which made porting the game to different computers more difficult. Blank couldn't include all of the game's text in the limited 80KB of disk space. Working with a newly hired advertising agency, Infocom created physical items to provide information not included within the digital game itself. These items were: A police folder in a pouch containing an Inspector's Casebook A plastic bag with 3 white pills found near Marshall Robner's body Notes from police interviews with Leslie and George Robner, Mr. Baxter, Ms. Dunbar, and Mrs. Rourke corpus delicti (summary of findings from the coroner's examination) A letter from Mr. Coates, Marshall Robner's lawyer, to the Chief of police An official memo from G.K. Anderson of the Lakeville, Connecticut police department A lab report on the teacup Robner drank from before his death A photo of the murder scene, complete with white chalk outline In later "grey-box" editions of Deadline, many of these documents were incorporated into the Casebook, rather than existing as separate papers. Reception Although Computer Gaming Worlds reviewer disliked the solution to Deadlines mystery, she praised the game's realism, documentation, extensive command vocabulary, and the frustration involved in both finding the killer and presenting enough evidence for a conviction. BYTE called the game "fascinating" and "great fun", calling the multiple endings "a radical departure from the prototypical mystery". PC Magazine called Deadline "of the highest quality. It is thoroughly researched and tested, and it is virtually flawless". The New York Times Book Review also mentioned the narrative and participatory character of the game. K-Power rated Deadline 8 points out of 10, stating that the game "is very exciting, is as good, or better, than Zork, and will bring long hours of enjoyment and, best of all, intrigue". The game received an award for "Best Computer Adventure" at the 4th annual Arkie Awards, where judges attributed the "richness and realism" of the game's dialogue to the advanced text parser that allows natural language input rather than the "telegraphic verb-noun phrases that other such disks generally employ". In 1996, Computer Gaming World listed Deadline at #104 among the top 150 best games of all time, calling it "a tough text adventure that placed you in the midst of an intricate police procedural and let you wander around a mansion." Reviews The V.I.P. of Gaming