Dead Zone

Overview

Dead Zone is a sci-fi adventure game from SunSoft which uses a common (for the system) menu-driven interface for interacting with the world and its characters. Players choose from a list of commands to perform actions such as examining their surroundings, picking up items, moving to new locations and talking to NPCs. Though this sort of adventure game would become common for the FDS and NES, Dead Zone is in fact only the second game of this type, after the trendsetting murder mystery adventure game Portopia.

The protagonist is an engineer named Kirk who hopes to meet his fiancee Marry at a space station, but instead finds it deserted and filled with broken robots. He must piece together what happened, how to get out and where his fiancee and the other denizens of the space station have gone.

The game is entirely in katakana, which was common for games at the time. It was never translated into English and never released outside of Japan. It also has nothing to do with the Stephen King book and movie of the same name.