User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Mar 25, 2017 8:06 pm

I've been looking for an original boxed copy of Infocom's exceptional interactive fiction game Lurking Horror on the Amiga for well over a year. One handy feature on Ebay is their "follow search" function which you can enable on whatever keywords you want to after you perform a search. I often have 15-20 of these running at all times for certain rare items I can't ever seem to find. Or, I sometimes use this feature for broader terms (e.g. amiga 2000 motherboard) that aren't exactly rare, but don't appear on the market very often.

Lurking Horror for Amiga, as far as I can tell, is an intensely rare product to find - especially in very good condition, with all of its "feelies" still in the box.

I had found a few copies in Europe in the past, but collectors over there often are asking for simply insane prices. Well, this week I finally struck solid gold for a very reasonable and fair price. Plus I got a domestic copy from the USA and it has every single item its supposed to have, too. To be honest, from what I've seen all copies of these old Infocom games came from the US and were shipped internationally. For example, whenever you see Infocom games for sale in the UK or Germany, they always have stickers on the disks. This is typically a key clue that a game was created in the US. European disks often had labels printed right onto the blue plastic in white or black.

The box is near-mint, and the game looks like it may have been copied once and stored ever since. To my knowledge Infocom never put annoying copy protection on their disks. You do, however, have to refer to the manual for special clues. I so prefer this kind of copy protection over the inability to copy your disks. There is never any need for cracks as a result.

Cool facts via WIkipeida:
The name of the university, G.U.E. Tech, is an obvious nod to Infocom's Zork games, which are set in the Great Underground Empire. In The Lurking Horror, G.U.E. Tech is an abbreviation for "George Underwood Edwards Institute of Technology". Many features of G.U.E. Tech, including the steam tunnels, are modeled after MIT, which many of Infocom's developers attended. In particular, the Infinite Corridor is a central feature of the MIT campus, and a door marked "Department of Alchemy" actually exists in Building 2 thanks to a late-20th-century hack.
Speaking of G.U.E. you can see in my photos below the G.U.E. student ID card and G.U.E. guide for freshmen.

In any case, my long search is finally over. And, now that I have the entire "experience" I'm going to jump back into playing this awesome, creepy game. The Amiga version has a special enhancement no other platform offered up to that point - sound! And it is super eerie and really increases the hair-raising intensity of the game.
Attachments
IMG_7343.JPG
Lurking Horror, front of the box.

IMG_7345.JPG
Lurking Horror, back of the box.

IMG_7346.JPG
Complete package for the Lurking Horror game for Amiga.

IMG_7348.JPG
If you've ever seen the Tingler, or Wrath of Khan, this might strike a chord.


User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Sat Mar 25, 2017 9:55 pm

Nice find! I love all those old Infocom games. I used to have a lot of them boxed up for C64 and some for Amiga but alas, they weren't in storage that I emptied a few years ago so might have went to my friends kids or something. Oh well. I have disk images and collections manuals from newer CD archive release.





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