How to play The Lurking Horror on Mac

Game summary

The Lurking Horror is an interactive fiction game released by Infocom in 1987. The game was written by Dave Lebling and inspired by the horror fiction writings of H. P. Lovecraft (including his Cthulhu Mythos). Like most of Infocom's games, it was released for several platforms simultaneously thanks to the Z-machine. The original release included versions for DOS, the Apple II, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit family and Commodore 64. Later, it was ported to the Amiga with the addition of sound effects, making it the first title with that feature. The effects would play at appropriate times in the game in an effort to intensify the horror atmosphere. This marked one of the few major additions to the Z-machine with the exception of graphics; traditionally, Infocom had eschewed such changes in favor of expanding the parser capacity and overall size of game files. It was Infocom's 26th game; Infocom rated it as "Standard" in terms of difficulty. Lurking Horror was the only horror game ever released by Infocom.
First released: Dec 1987

Play The Lurking Horror on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play The Lurking Horror on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

The Lurking Horror installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install The Lurking Horror like you would on any PC.
Did it work?
Help us improve our guide by letting us know if it worked for you.
👎👍