Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare
Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare is an interactive fiction video game written by Michael Berlyn and published by Infocom in 1983. Like most Infocom titles, it was available on most popular personal computers of the day, such as the Apple II, PC, Atari ST, and Commodore 64. It was Infocom's sixth game. The player's character has been embedded within a facility that controls vital systems, such as moving public transportation belts and weather control, for an Earth-settled planet called Contra. During the player's five-hundred-year tenure, the player would normally be kept in stasis while his sleeping mind serves as the Central Mentality for the largely self-maintaining systems. As the game opens, however, he is awakened by severe error messages; something is going wrong. The facility has suffered catastrophic damage from an earthquake, and the Filtering Computers are shutting down or becoming dangerously unstable. The inhabitants of the city assume that the Central Mentality has gone insane and is purposely harming the city, as a previous CM had done. The player's task is to repair the damage and restore the systems to normal states before a crew arrives at the facility to "disconnect" his mind, killing him, to be replaced with a clone.