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

UPDATE 2025-09-24: Various folks have reached to to give insight and follow-ups to try and help in all this down (and to "play along"). I want to give shout out to three. Stephen, himself, realized that #9 was actually related to the creature flying away. In 2020, a person named Andrew contacted me to explain that two pairs of sound effects — #8 & #9 as well as #11 & #16 — were meant to play back-to-back but had some glitches. Finally, another person [Kristina] more recently contacted me to point out that #16 was less an "aaah" and more the sound of a baby-like cry followed by a grunt. I felt it was a good time to go ahead and update it to all current data [though it makes me sad to delete the initial "forklift" guess for #9]. I also include a note about why certain sounds were hard to place a decade ago when we first worked on this. Thanks to all who helped. It has been something like 17-years since I have done a full playthrough of the game. I should really revisit it.

THE MOSTLY ORIGINAL POST

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.

Future Doug Note: Over time, these have morphed as we've made more progress so the initial lists of both are a bit lost to web-time, but those wanting to see them can see a Way Back Machine of 1-year into it that already had a couple of updates but so it goes. I doubt I have the initial list stored anywhere.

The table has the current notes (as of 2025-09-24). Mild spoilers.

Sound #	Doug's Description	Stephen (et al)'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	The squeakiest flapping wings ever [Thanks Stephen and Andrew]	The Creature Flying Away [triggers after #8]
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	A baby-like cry followed by a grunt [Thanks, Kristina]	Creature from the Inner Lair [triggers after #11]
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 initially because...well → 2025-09-26: I am very late on adding this, but the glitch due to the double-sound trigger was documented in a now defunct frobnitz documentation page (see remarks)]. Thanks, Andrew, for the link.

If you want to try and help, you can download The Lurking Horror sounds as AIFF in a zip file. [This was served by Google Drive for a bit, but due to permissions needing to be updated semi-regularly I just moved it to my own file storage].

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