“Come, Watson! The Game is Afoot!” Sherlock Holmes: An Adventure in Videogames

Abstract

One of the most famous fictional characters in crime fiction, Sherlock Holmes, made his debut in 1887 in the detective story A Study in Scarlet. Since then, the detective, created by the British writer and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), has been portrayed in multiple formats worldwide, including video games.
In the first part of this article, I will examine the sociocultural context of the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras, which aligns with the timeline of the Sherlock Holmes canon. The following section provides an overview of video games centred on the character of Sherlock Holmes. Since 1984, Holmes has been adapted across myriad gaming platforms, beginning with Beam Software’s text-based adventure Sherlock for the Spectrum and Commodore, and continuing to 2025 with The Beekeeper's Picnic: A Sherlockian Adventure for PC, developed by Afoot Games. This article aims to explore how Sherlock Holmes has influenced the video game industry and evolved to meet the challenges of adaptation as an iconic character who has transcended both time and space.