What is Spycraft: The Great Game?

At first blush, this is just not the kind of game I would like—lots of full-motion video clips combined with extremely linear gameplay usually adds up to no fun. But not here. Thanks to an extremely compelling plot, excellent production values and great puzzles, Spycraft manages to do what few other “interactive movies” have done—tell a story within the context of a great game.

The plot is straight ahead techno-thriller, in the best Tom Clancy tradition. Late CIA director William Colby and former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin consulted on the game design, and play themselves as characters in the game. You play an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency, who is recruited straight from training and sent into a deep-cover role. After the assassination of a top Russian presidential candidate, your job is to liaise with Russian government security to sort through a confusing Web of assassins, rogue spies and Russian Mafiosos, to prevent the collapse of the Russian government and the loss of Soviet-era strategic arsenals (i.e. nuclear weapons).

Spycraft’s actual gameplay consists of watching full-motion video clips, making a few decisions, solving puzzles and moving on to the next video sequence. Even if you usually find linear adventures tiresome, the plot’s tightness demands linearity, and for once, it works well. The puzzles themselves are excellent, and correspond to what actual intelligence agents might do; whether it’s retracing the path of an assassin’s bullet, using a database to create a composite of a suspect’s face, analyzing satellite images or conducting an interrogation. Although the puzzles are challenging enough for most hard core gamers, novices will find that, with time, they can make their way through most of them, too. One of the most appealing aspects of the puzzles is their novelty—we just haven’t seen puzzles like this before.

To keep the game up-to-date, part of the code is written in HTML (the language of the Web) which gives you access to a special Spycraft Web site from within the game. This site updates the game and allows access to the real Web sites of the CIA, DEA and other federal agencies. Because the main interface of the game is that of a special personal digital assistant, like a Newton, the Web link is a natural addition. Still, the amount of time a real CIA operative would spend on the public CIA Web site is debatable.

Still, not everything is perfect in Spycraft. Most of my problems weren’t with the game design, but the system requirements. The game barely ran on my trusty 6100/60, even though I have 24MB RAM and Speed Doubler—the movies were extremely choppy and suffered tons of frame drop out. That sucked, because not only are the movies essential to knowing what’s going on, but they’re also well done, and nothing is more frustrating than being pulled out of a dark, ominous scene with fantastic music and acting, by QuickTime crapping out on you. On any faster Power Mac, the game ran, but the problems on low-end Power Macs cost Spycraft one point in its rating.

Bottom line: This is an exceptionally well-created product. The story is awesome, the puzzles are fun, and if you have a Mac powerful enough to play it, there is absolutely no excuse not to own this impressive title.

Charla, Chris. (September 1996). Spycraft: The Great Game. MacAddict. (pg. 66).

Download Spycraft: The Great Game for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• MC68040 @ 33 MHz
• 8 MB RAM with 8 MB virtual memory
• 640 x 480 resolution display
• 2X CD-ROM drive
• System 7.5.1

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II