Crime Time

My brother sold his Commodore 64 before I could say a word. Classic move. I managed to get one myself later — used, with the mechanics and a stack of disks — and Crime Time by Starbyte was one of those titles I actually played on it. Mostly with the result that I ended up behind bars or worse.

Crime Time is a text adventure from 1990, set in a criminal underworld. You play a detective — or at least someone trying to be one — and your task is to unravel the case before the game swallows you with its own pitfalls. Starbyte was a German studio that released titles for home computers across platforms at the time, and Crime Time existed for both Commodore 64 and MS-DOS.

The controls are parser-based: you type commands, the game responds. That wasn't anything new in 1990, but Crime Time's parser handled things reasonably well — at least compared to some contemporary titles that ignored entire sentences and fumed silently. What made the game frustrating was the fact that one wrong move could send you down a dead end with no warning. Saving your position and backing up became a necessity, not a habit.

The PC version brought a slightly different experience than the C64 original — the graphics were more restrained, the atmosphere perhaps a bit colder. Hardboiled detective fiction from a disk, without music to distract you. Pure text and imagination. These days that sounds like a budget constraint, but back then it was genre standard and worked well for plenty of players. The problem is, Crime Time was never top-tier — it wasn't Infocom, it wasn't Sierra. It was a solid, somewhat rough Central European adventure that didn't cheat you, but didn't stand out either.

Today Crime Time appeals mainly to those who love text adventures as a form of interactive reading and don't mind the game offering zero hints. Nostalgia is of course a powerful engine — whoever played it on C64 or DOS in the nineties will recognize that rough criminal atmosphere instantly. For newcomers to text adventures, it's a somewhat fragile entry point, but it's definitely worth a play session in the browser. If your brother also cheated you out of something, you know what to do.