Presenting the dossier: suspect files on screen and in print
From a paper crime file bound into the back of the manual to an alien rap sheet on the VAL 9000, how the series showed you who you were chasing.
Every game in the series gives the player a file on each suspect, but how that file is delivered — on screen, on paper, or both — changed with the hardware, tracking the jump from floppy-disk Apple IIs to VGA CD-ROM machines across the run of titles.
Paper first
The 1985 original’s Police Dossiers menu had a print twin: the manual states that “the crime files are also available at the end of this manual in a slightly different form,” so a player could thumb through printed dossiers on desk rather than clicking through the in-game menu. That doubling made sense on hardware where reloading a menu screen took real, noticeable time.
The Dataminder gallery
The Deluxe Edition moved the files entirely on screen. Clicking the DOSSIER button on the Dataminder brought up a partial list of the twenty suspects, with a flashing MORE button to cycle through the rest; clicking a name displayed that suspect’s picture alongside their modus operandi.
Mugshots through time
Where in Time presented its fifteen henchmen as a grid of inmate cards, each headed by an Inmate Number next to the suspect’s photo, hair colour and eye colour — a booking-photo aesthetic to match the game’s crime-through-the-ages theme.
Alien rap sheets
Where in Space went furthest from the paper original: its Warrant Dossiers screen shows fifteen squares on the VAL 9000 computer, one per suspect, that the player clicks to zoom into a full file — occupation, description, gender, eye count, feature, locomotion and favourites — while eliminated suspects grey out automatically as the evidence narrows the list.
What stayed constant
Presentation aside, every format serves the same purpose: give the player enough to recognise a suspect from a witness’s stray remark, without simply printing the name outright. Whether that file is a paragraph bound into a manual, a Dataminder screen with a MORE button, an inmate photo card, or a greyed-out square on an alien database, the player is always working from the same kind of evidence — a handful of trait clues that only add up to one name once enough of them are logged. Even Where in Europe, whose individual suspect names were not documented for this wiki, kept the print half of the tradition alive with a bundled poster of suspect faces.