The President is Missing

Cosmi was among the publishers that tried, on eight-bit hardware, to build games around investigation and information handling rather than reflexes. The President is Missing, released for the Commodore 64 in 1988, sits squarely in that tradition: the American president has disappeared and your job is to work out from the available material who is responsible and where he is being held.

Play therefore resembles detective work far more than action. You examine records, compare details, look for inconsistencies and draw conclusions. Games of this kind were unusual in requiring the player to take notes away from the screen — progress without paper and pencil was difficult, and the designers assumed as much.

The Commodore 64 had enough memory and a disk drive to support this, allowing larger volumes of text and information revealed in stages. The graphics are restrained because the weight lies elsewhere, and the SID chip is used more for atmosphere than for action music.

By modern standards the game is slow and demands patience, but the kind of entertainment it offers largely disappeared in the years that followed. Anyone who enjoys investigative games where the solution is deduced from real evidence rather than picked from a menu will find an ancestor of the modern detective title here.

Anyone trying it should set aside an uninterrupted stretch of time. It does not survive being played in fragments — lose track of what you have established and you are effectively starting again.

On OldGame.cz it plays directly in the browser, no installation needed. The text is in English.