Crime and Punishment (video game)

Crime and Punishment is a legal simulation video game developed by Imagic and published for the Apple II and Commodore 64 in 1984. Mindscape released a port for IBM PC compatibles (MS-DOS) the same year. The game was created by criminal justice experts Jack Kress and Graeme Newman, who based the simulation on government research into sentencing guidelines.

Gameplay

The player assumes the role of a sentencing judge in a criminal law matter. Information available to the player includes the nature of the crime committed, the defendant's prior criminal history, and pre-sentencing reports. The player may also review known facts relating to the case before sentencing the prisoner to probation, jail, prison, or—in murder cases—the death penalty. When imprisonment is chosen, the player also selects the length of the prison term.

Scoring is based on how closely the sentence handed out by the player matches the sentence that a real-life judge decided in the actual case; the player is penalized for asking irrelevant questions.

A notable feature of pirated editions of the game is that they contained only one kind of case—software piracy—and the only available sentence was death.

Reception

A review in Family Computing (April 1985) found that, despite some lack of documentation, the game was "a worthwhile program, and one that makes good use of the computer." Electronic Games (February 1985) called it "a marvelous piece of software that will not only educate and enlighten its users" and stated it would "prove more entertaining than 'The People's Court'."

Technical details