Five regions, nine time bands: the America's Past map

Where in America’s Past (1991) swaps the airport for a two-axis map. The manual divides the country into five regions (West, Midwest, East, Southwest and South) and the timeline into “nine twenty-five year increments starting from before 1800 to the present.” Multiply them out and the thief’s hideout is “one of 45 locations in time and place.” The ride is ACME’s Chronoskimmer 450SL, billed by the manual as “the latest in time travel equipment” and a newer model than the 325i of Where in Time.

Reading the dashboard

The MS-DOS release puts the whole case on one control panel. SEARCH opens the three investigation options (Ask Bystander, Consult Source, Listen In); RECORDS logs clues into the Evidence Database or opens the V.I.L.E. dossiers; MAP brings up the Destination Map and Timeline; LAUNCH jumps. Readouts show the current region and band (“0 – 1800” for the earliest, “1976 – 2000” for the latest) and a TIME LEFT counter in hours. ACME’s electronic mail, flagged by an envelope icon on the panel, is how word on the suspect’s identity arrives. On the map, ZOOM opens a region’s state list with each admission year. It files Kentucky and West Virginia under the South and Alaska and Hawaii under the West, which settles a few arguments before they start.

No connecting flights

The bigger change is freedom. Earlier games offered a short list of connections; here any region in any period is open at any moment, as a contemporary review of the MS-DOS version pointed out. Nothing stops a wrong guess either, so the 450SL keeps a Travel Log for backtracking. The bands are calendar slices, not historical eras, and the same reviewer noticed that cuts both ways: one twenty-five-year band can hand you the Depression in one region and the Second World War in another. Each stop pairs one fixed picture (Compute! noted many were rendered from digitised photos) with a history note that can change between cases.

Clock, mail and the book

The Federal Time Commission rations the machine’s hours, and every jump and search draws them down. Promotions bring longer cases but a bigger allowance, so the squeeze is tightest early on, when ACME’s mail can also run dry before you have enough for a warrant. After each promotion the game asks a question answered from the bundled What Happened When: A Chronology of Life and Events in America by Gorton Carruth, an abridgement of his Encyclopedia of American Facts & Dates. The reviewer noted the question hands you everything needed to find the entry without touching the index.

What goes missing

The loot is American history itself. The game’s newspaper-style manual reports the Declaration of Independence vanishing from Philadelphia in 1776, the first gold nugget from Sutter’s Mill and Francis Scott Key’s anthem lyrics filched, and the Liberty Bell cracked during a botched 1782 heist. The box adds the Pecos River and Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, and one reviewed case opened on the Olympic Village stolen from Lake Placid in 1980, never mind how. See the stolen treasures for the series-wide habit.