Name: Border Zone
Developed by: Infocom
Published by: Infocom
Date published: 1987
Platforms: ...everything from lowliest Commodore 64 to the hoggiest Windows...

An Interactive Fiction (text adventure) game from Infocom, written by Marc Blank, released in 1987.

Border Zone is a spy adventure. Basically, you are an outsider - a businessman or a spy from either East or West - on a way on a fictional Eastern Bloc country Frobnia.

What makes Border Zone unlike all other Infocom games was that this one had a clock! The time ticked onward and some actions happened in real time... Of course, by choosing a different difficulty level the pace of the game somewhat slowed down.

The game is also remarkable for its funny documentation (in rich Infocom document style); it comes with an absolutely hilarious "tourist guide" for people visiting in Frobnia (complete with a phrasebook, including the ever so useful translation for "you are under arrest!" - "Oyzhna gotcha", I think, I need to verify this one later though).

The game may be available second-hand - Activision published several Infocom collections with this game included. The original version is getting rare. The game itself is written in Z-machine code, and should be playable on any platform with a Z-code interpreter (though some may not support the clock properly, but at least Frotz does).