Crimeface

Lore & Background

Crimeface stars David Crellin as Detective Harry Adams of the Modern Device Crime Unit, who enlists hacker Tranz Van Zandt, played by Wayne Simmonds, to solve a murder. The cast also includes Craig Cheetham, Tom Charnock, Nikki Tovell, and others. The story and script were written by Richard Davis and Stott.

Reader's Guide

Crimeface is notable for its integration of interactive elements within a filmic narrative. The live-action sequences are presented in one window, while a second window opens onto interactive story components in multiple media formats, allowing viewers to explore the world without leaving the film. It won both the Webby and People's Voice awards in the Online Film & Video – Experimental category at the 2008 Webby Awards. The project was described on launch as 'a glimpse of the future for on-screen fiction' by Pocket-Lint, and Aleks Krotoski of The Guardian noted that it 'pushes the notion of interactivity and play into a different game space.'

Did You Know?

• Crimeface was nominated for a prize at the Viper Film Festival of Digital Media in 2006.
• The film features two windows: one for live action and one for interactive story elements.

Classification and the Film-Game Boundary

Crimeface occupies a creative space that resists easy categorization. In the source material from which it is drawn, it appears in a list explicitly described as covering interactive films, yet the same document acknowledges that some entries in this collection are considered films while others are considered video games. Crimeface sits squarely within this ambiguous territory, a work that blends narrative storytelling with player agency in a way that blurs the line between passive viewing and active participation. This classification challenge is not unique to Crimeface; it is an inherent tension in the entire medium, stretching back to the earliest experiments like Life Targets in 1912 and Auto Test in 1954, through the laserdisc era of the 1980s, and into the modern period. By the time Crimeface arrived in 2008, the boundary between cinema and interactive entertainment had been tested repeatedly, yet no consensus had fully resolved which side of the divide any given title belonged to. Crimeface stands as one more data point in that ongoing definitional debate, a work that invites the audience to engage with a story rather than simply witness it, without neatly fitting into either the film or the game column.

A 2008 Release in a Transitional Decade

Crimeface was released in 2008, a year that the interactive film timeline records as a modest one. The 2000s as a whole represent a noticeable lull in the medium's output compared to the extraordinary density of the 1990s, when years like 1993 and 1995 each produced more than a dozen interactive titles ranging from Star Wars: Rebel Assault to Phantasmagoria. In 2008, only four entries are documented: 428: Shibuya Scramble, Casebook, Crimeface, and Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove. This sparse grouping places Crimeface in a transitional window, a period after the CD-ROM and early console interactive boom of the 1990s but before the 2010s saw a dramatic resurgence with titles like Heavy Rain, The Walking Dead, and Detroit: Become Human. The 2000s entries that do appear—spanning from Love Story and Star Strike in 2000 through titles in 2005 and 2006—suggest a medium in a state of quiet evolution, experimenting with new platforms and narrative structures. Crimeface, as part of this smaller 2008 cohort, represents the medium's continued, if less visible, presence during this bridging era.

Position in the Interactive Film Timeline

The full span of the interactive film record stretches from Life Targets in 1912 through the 1970s experiments like Wild Gunman and The Driver, through the laserdisc explosion of the 1980s with Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, through the dense 1990s, into the 2000s, the 2010s, the 2020s, and even an upcoming title called Ghosts. Crimeface, released in 2008, sits roughly two-thirds of the way through this more than century-long chronology. It comes after the era of interactive works tied to specific hardware like the 3DO console or Sega Saturn, and after the 1990s period when the medium produced its most prolific output. Yet it precedes the 2010s and 2020s wave that brought interactive storytelling to mainstream audiences through titles like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, The Dark Pictures Anthology entries, and Life Is Strange. Crimeface thus occupies a middle chapter in the medium's history, a period when the form was neither in its experimental infancy nor in its current era of broad commercial visibility, but was instead quietly persisting and evolving between two major waves of creative activity.

Cohort Context: The 2008 Interactive Film Year

In the documented record, Crimeface shares its 2008 release year with exactly three other interactive titles: 428: Shibuya Scramble, Casebook, and Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove. This small cohort stands in stark contrast to the 1990s, when a single year could yield more than fifteen interactive works, or even to the 2010s, when years like 2013 and 2015 each produced a dozen or more. The 2008 grouping suggests a medium that had narrowed in scope during the 2000s, with fewer titles reaching the threshold of recognition to be catalogued alongside the broader history. Crimeface, Casebook, and the other two 2008 entries represent the surviving output of a year in which the interactive film form was present but not dominant. Looking backward, this cohort follows a 2006 that included Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and Final Destination 3, and a 2007 with The Act and Return to House on Haunted Hill. Looking forward, the 2010s would see the medium expand dramatically. Crimeface's 2008 cohort, then, captures a specific moment of relative quiet in the interactive storytelling landscape, a pause between the 1990s abundance and the 2010s renaissance.