Circuit's Edge (1990)

Circuit's Edge is a computer game developed by Westwood Associates and released by Infocom in 1989. It is based on George Alec Effinger's 1987 novel When Gravity Fails. The game is a hybrid interactive fiction/role-playing game; it contains a window of text, a graphic window for depiction of the player's current location, and various menus and mini-windows for character statistics and other game functions.

Storyline

The player assumes the role of Marîd Audran, a private detective. The game is set in "The Budayeen", an entertainment/criminal quarter in an unnamed city somewhere in the Middle East that is based on New Orleans. While running a series of errands/"business deals" for "Saied the Half-Hajj", a friend of Marîd's, Marîd is framed for the murder of a man named Kenji Carter. Although Marîd's influential patron Friedlander Bey clears him with the local police, Bey asks him to look into Carter's death. Doing so leads Marîd deep into the criminal underworld of the Budayeen.