Five successful mystery writers are meeting at the Gargoyle Hotel. At midnight, one of them will be killed. As Hercule Holmes, the world's most famous detective, can you discover the murderer, victim, weapon, location and motive before the killer strikes?
Killed Until Dead is a video game by Accolade, released for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Apple ][.
This game contains examples of the following tropes:
- Affectionate Parody: Of golden age detective mysteries.
- Bald of Evil: Sydney, in those mysteries where he's the murderer. And Claudia and Peter, under the same conditions.
- Black Widow: Claudia has been married four times; all four of her husbands died in freak gardening accidents within weeks of the marriage.
- Bland-Name Product: One mystery revolves around the ownership of the MucBurgers franchise.
- Cigar Chomper: Sydney always has a cigar in the corner of his mouth.
- Faint in Shock: Agatha faints if you correctly accuse her.
- Flavor Text: The files on the suspects contain a large amount of humorous but irrelevant details (for example, that Sydney "grows and eats rare orchids"), among which clues may be hidden.
- High-Class Glass: Lord Peter wears one. If you manage to rattle him while interrogating him, his monocle flies off — but it still blinks when his eyes do.
- Hand of Death: If you accuse the wrong person, one shoots you.
- Leitmotif: Each suspect has their own, which plays when you view their file or speak to them on the telephone. Sydney's is the Dragnet theme, for example, and Mike's is the Peter Gunn theme.
- Loads and Loads of Loading: On the Spectrum, when each mystery had to be loaded from cassette.
- Multiple-Choice Past: The five suspects' past history is different in each mystery.
- Parody Names: Four of the five suspects are Mike Stammer, Lord Peter Flimsey, Agatha Maypole, and Sydney Meanstreet. The odd one out is Claudia, who is named after real-life murder suspect Claus von Bulow
. - Smoking Is Glamorous: As part of being The Vamp, Claudia always makes her appearances with a cigarette in her mouth.
- Universal-Adaptor Cast: The five characters play different roles in 21 mysteries.
- When the Clock Strikes Twelve: You have until midnight, game time, to discover the murderer.
- The Vamp: Claudia's role.
