Spycraft: The Great Game

Revisiting Spycraft: The Great Game

A Year of Adventure #17, in which we join the CIA and save the President.


In Spycraft, you're a CIA agent investigating a recent high-ranking assassination in Russia. Why? Because the President is counting on you dammit, and the fate of the entire world depends on it. And that’s President as in the President of these/those United States, and not President as in the President of the Minnesota Book Club.

We’re dealing with a man who’s about to broker a treaty with Russia that will ensure nuclear disarmament and peace for the foreseeable future, not someone looking to spark a discussion about social status after reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s. So no, no amount of cheating by trying to find a place that still rents a copy of the video will save you here.Assassination. U.S. President. Russia. CIA. Terrorists. Nuclear Weapons. The stakes couldn’t possibly get any higher. Unless of course there happens to be a mole inside the CIA feeding information and technology to the terrorists. Yeah, turns out there’s one of those too, so on top of all that other stuff, add ‘trust no one’ to the list. Trust no one. Meaning, you’re actually going to have to get your hands dirty if you plan on playing this great game of espionage. But, be sure to wash up if you plan on handling any food.Of course this is all figurative, and these allusions to a classic ‘90s sitcom is just a bit of fun. Real world espionage is serious business, filled with individuals who follow rules and abide by strict codes of conduct. No wait, that’s the Hollywood take on espionage. A world filled with people who wear tuxedos, go to the opera, and carry guns that choose to remain silent. As to not disturb the performances on stage.You see, simple jests. Or, are they?

Firing up Windows ’95 and inserting Disc 1 of Activision’s 1996 adventure game Spycraft: The Great Game into the CD-ROM drive of a PC will no doubt get anyone’s hands dirty. Because any PC that still has a functioning CD-ROM drive and a copy of Windows ’95 installed, is bound to be covered in dust.


One doesn’t usually associate Activision with the adventure genre, or formative PC gaming. Its early successes were closely tied to the console market, through machines like the Atari 2600 and Intellivision, and action-centric games in the early ‘80s like River Raid and Pitfall! The company had its eye – as it does today – on the broader market, and quickly became one of the bigger and more successful videogame publishers in the biz.A classic.

Not that kind of raid.

Aside from finding critical and commercial success, Activision’s history during the ‘80s and ‘90s is also one filled with name changes, mergers, bankruptcy, and re-branding. At one point the company even changed its name to Mediagenic, which sounds like the sort of company that Paul Reiser’s character from Aliens might work for.

In one way or another, however, Activision was also involved in the PC game market. In the adventure game space it published a few titles throughout the ‘80s, including Labyrinth: The Computer Game from Lucasfilm Games. In 1986 it also, famously, bought Infocom, pioneers of the text adventure and creator of Zork, who at the time was struggling financially.

Now, how Activision ended up with the Infocom name and its library of titles is a long and interesting story but let’s be clear from the outset – the subsequent downfall of Infocom is not the story of an evil corporation buying out a small creative company and destroying it from within. It’s actually a story about a company who made text-adventures that didn’t really see the point of investing in graphics until it was too late and long after it spent all its money trying to create an easy to use database software package.

Although that may sound strange, that was actually part of a pretty common belief in the early ‘80s: a belief that business application software was the wave of the future, and computer games were simply these fun little diversions that could disappear at any moment.Ever game needs novelisation.

Every game needs novelisation.

There was probably an ‘80s Twilight Zone episode covering this very subject. Called “Five and a Quarter Inches of Misery” it probably featured a man waking up one day to find that all his computer game disks had disappeared. With nothing left but a calculator program on a single 5.25” floppy, the twist here was that when he typed in 5318008 to cheer himself up, when read upside down, it actually spelt out something like “All the fun in the world is gone.” Instead of, y’know, “BOOBIES.”

Twilight Zone twists were prescient like that.

But by the time 1990 rolled around, Infocom had closed its doors as a developer and was all but relegated to the annals of computer game history. After the release of a compendium of classic Infocom text-adventures that sold moderately well, Activision looked towards resurrecting the name with a new Zork title. Called Return to Zork, it was a new adventure game published under the Infocom label that saw a release on PC as well as consoles like the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. It was about as far from being a text adventure as you could get, with a first-person perspective and lots of video of real actors on top of digital sets, but it helped renew interest in both the series and the label.

The plan for Activision here was to use the Infocom name for all its new adventure game releases, and with the advent of the CD-ROM and the success of titles like Myst, these Infocom releases would very much be the modern adventure games coming from Activision. With that in mind two new Infocom branded games would go into development; one a new entry in the Zork series and the other a gritty, realistic look at being a CIA agent. Both titles would be multimedia products in every sense of the word with digital video, audio, and images.Gold, Jerry, gold.

Gold, Jerry, gold.

Curiously enough, however, when development finished and both titles saw release in 1996, they did so under the Activision banner instead of Infocom. In the end, Activision saw greater value in trying to broaden its portfolio, and conversely, the Infocom label - as revered and prestigious as it was - still referred to titles and an era where text adventures appealed to a very niche market.

So in the mid-‘90s, amongst a predominantly action-oriented and console game-focused output, Activision would momentarily pause and release two colon-happy FMV driven adventure games, Zork: Nemesis and Spycraft: The Great Game.


When people think of the word spy they usually also think of the word gadget, like a watch that shoots lasers or a shoe that doubles as a telephone. And with the word gadget one also thinks about the word technology, because a spy gadget is usually something at the very cutting edge of what’s possible. That is, in the dreams of a fiction writer. Like a watch that shoots lasers, or a shoe that doubles as a telephone.Good thinking, 99.

He's got 99 problems.

But one thing’s for certain, and that is that the smart phone has all but killed the ‘wow factor’ that one usually associates with spy gadgets. With today’s smart phone one can take pictures, video, secretly record conversations, connect to GPS tracking, send emails, instant messages, and even let people that are close by know that they’re available for a little hunka chunka. Before the smart phone one would need any number of large oversized gadgets to perform the above, and in the world of fiction having all of this done with a single device, the sort of phone that everybody owns, is a little boring.

1996 is a time long before the smart phone. It’s even a time before the digital camera. In the world of Spycraft: The Great Game, if you happened to be captured taking pictures of a secret military installation in the outskirts of Pakistan and your captors rip out and destroy your roll of film, you can be glad that you work for the CIA. Why? Because in 1996 the CIA has access to microchip technology capable of - get this - storing low-resolution images as digital files. One might call them, digital photos.So it was a different era. And in this era, FMV games were seen as the future – as technologically advanced as video games could get – and there were a bunch of them. Even amongst other FMV-driven games from the ‘90s, however, Spycraft stands out. Namely because of one word - realism. And that’s not to say that the story about presidential assassination and magic laser rifles that don’t use bullets is in anyway realistic, it’s not, but the ambition is very real. Most games of the era that filmed and presented actors in cut-scenes usually did so in front of a blue or green screen before superimposing them onto comparatively crude digital environments.

The presentation in Spycraft is very different and carries with it a very serious, almost prestigious, tone. Not only are the characters represented by real-world and recognisable actors but the locations themselves are made up of real-world sets. So if you find yourself in an office, you can be sure that what you are looking at is a photo of real-world objects like desks, chairs, and telephones. Which in turn makes every location in game look and feel like a movie set, with props, lighting, and everything else.That looks... more like a teenager's bedroom.

That looks... more like a teenager's bedroom than anything else.

Even the introduction sequence, which takes you to CIA headquarters in Langley, is presented first though an actual aerial shot of the building before cutting to a first-person walkthrough of offices that look every bit like the real thing.


It looks and feels as good as a movie. Or at the very least a made-for-TV movie, which is still quite the achievement for an FMV game. And when you’re prompted with text advising that development featured input from ex-head of the CIA William Colby, you know this is a very different, and ultimately very weird game. William Colby, who tragically died shortly after the game’s release, even appears as himself offering titbits of information and advice on being a covert agent working for the CIA.USA USA USA!

Sleepy time, Harrison.

Sure, when these sequences happen it kind of looks like he’s just reading from a script page he was handed a few minutes earlier, but his inclusion and that also of an ex-KGB general, sounds like the sort of thing that shouldn’t really be possible.

That’s not to say that the story and game elements themselves are the CIA equivalent of something like European Truck Simulator. No, Spycraft is more along the lines of a ‘90s Harrison Ford movie, the sort of movie where on the poster it looks like he’s using the U.S. flag as a blanket.

In This Article

Spycraft: The Great Game Image

Spycraft: The Great Game

Genres:Action, Adventure
Language, Mild Language, Realistic Violence, Animated Violence
Platforms:Macintosh, PC
Features:Number Of Players, Memory Card
Release Date:January 1, 1996