even browbeat them to work on a holy day. As the game begins, the player awakens to realize that he has been drugged by his men, who have stolen most of the equipment and abandoned the camp. All the food and water is gone, and the player has no idea how to get back to civilization. He may very well have been left to die in the barren desert. But the navigation box finally arrives, convincing him that everything will work out as long as he can find the pyramid. Once he does, of course, there is the small matter of the traps the Egyptians set to protect their treasures from plunderers like him. Release During Development, the game was initially called "Pyramid", though it was only through Infocom'''s ad agency that they asked for a new title, as "Pyramid" seemed rather uninspired. A Harvard University Egyptologist assisted in game design. One of the multiple endings was changed during playtesting because players thought that it rewarded an ethnic bias. There are 40 ways for the player to die.Infidels packaging includes the following physical items: An "Expedition Log" kept by the player's character in the weeks prior to the game beginning An envelope containing a letter written to Rose Ellingsworth by the player's character A rubbing and partial translation of Dr. Ellington's limestone fragment from 1920 A roughly sketched map of the excavation area ReceptionSoftline called Infidel "diabolical... more death traps per square foot in the game than there are in Raiders of the Lost Ark". PC Magazine rated the game 12 points out of 12. It praised the sophisticated text parser, and described creator Michael Berlyn's prose as "exciting and fast-paced, with occasional bits of humor". Scorpia, normally a fan of Infocom games, so disliked Infidel that she never mentioned it in Computer Gaming World. She denounced the game during an online discussion with Berlyn, however: "I did not like the premise of the story. I did not like the main character. I did not like the ending. I felt it was a poor choice to have a character like that in an Infocom game, since after all, regardless of the main character in the story, *I* am the only one who is really playing the game, really solving the puzzles". References External links Package and documentation Infocom Bugs List entry Review in GAMES'' magazine 1980s interactive fiction 1983 video