Working on identifying the sound cues from the old Infocom IF game, The Lurking Horror

BLOT: (11 Mar 2015 - 08:41:32 AM)

Working on identifying the sound cues from the old Infocom IF game, The Lurking Horror

It has been some years (I think about seven), since I've written my somewhat user-friendly walk-through of The Lurking Horror, which ended up being not only one of the more popular pages on my site but also one of the more popular walk-throughs of the game. Rarely do I get much correspondence from it, nowadays, but I have fond memories of writing it and talking about the game to folk.

Recently I *did* get an email from a Stephen asking me to help him identify the sound cues in the game. If you do not know, The Lurking Horror had a series of sounds that would play at key events, to add some flavor to the text-based adventure. It also had a manual that was a combination of a short "how to play" and story-text and was even required to play: mixed in with the fun notes on the setting there was a password that you needed to progress in the game. These two elements helped to give it a "beyond-the-console" feel to it and has made it a favorite of mine.

Back to Stephen's question, he was curious about where specifically the sounds show up. It has been too long since I've played for me to know this off the top of my head, but I decided to start digging. I found someone had packaged a blorb file of the sounds as AIFF. I extracted that and listened to them. I wrote up my impression of what the sounds sounded like [divorced from events in the game]. Stephen had sent me a list of the sound effects that he identified, and with the sound files and my descriptions, matched up the lists. See the following table (note, mildish spoilers) (bonus note: Stephen's descriptions were sent first, but I tried to keep them out of mind when writing my description, so I've put them second here):

Sound #	Doug's Description	Stephen's Placement
3	Sort of a squishy/gurgle sounds	Maintenance man removing the axe from his chest
4	Screaming, as a group	Rats
6	Musical Hook	Opening the hatch in the tomb
7	Sort of a rumbling sound, with what sounds like an elevator ding and a crash	Brick wall ripping in concrete box
8	Very short rustly sound	Getting the stone (to end the game)
9	Squeaky wheels followed by a scream?	[Probably the forklift]*
10	Drums	Nightmare chant
11	Electricity	Putting the line in the connector
12	Long screech	Creature screeching after the stone is thrown at it from the roof
13	Chant	Alchemy lab chant
15	Robot voice sound	Encountering the wire urchins in the Large Chamber
16	Not sure...sort of a "aaaaah" sound	Creature from the Inner Lair
17	Sort of a cross between mechanic clicks and insect screeching	Entering the Inner Lair
18	Sort of a gurgling laugh sound	Gurgling from under the plate at the altar

Two notes. First, there are no sounds with the numbers 1, 2, 5, or 14, which makes 14 total sounds even though the last one is #18. Second, sounds #9 and #16 were guesses by Stephen (they are in brackets and marked with *) [Doug note: since the writing of this, #16 has been identified]. He says these did not play in Winfrotz.

If you want to try and help, you can download The Lurking Horror sounds as AIFF in a zip file.

If you do want to play along, I'm looking for the following information:

Are the sound links above correct? Are there any other particular notes of interest?
Do some sounds not work in some interpreters, or is it that they have to be triggered specifically to work?
Are any of the sounds used in more than one place?

Happy hunting!

The Lurking Horror