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The Cold War had nothing to do with snowballs!

Spycraft: The Great Game, an original cold war adventure game with puzzle and simulation elements, is now available on GOG.com for only $5.99.

So, you want to know the details? You don't have the proper clearance, but I suppose it doesn't really matter anymore. Back in the day, I would have to "silence" you, even with the little knowledge you already have. Nothing personal, of course--just the usual procedure. There's just too much at stake here, you see? No, I don't just mean national security. I'm referring to global safety. This went way beyond CIA, KGB, and their little games. Or, should I rather say: our great game. They had the bomb, we had the bomb. Then someone shot one of their most prominent politicians. Things became tense and crisis escalated. You're a reporter, you're familiar with the term "MAD", right? Yes, Mutual Assured Destruction. The assurance was supposed to prevent the war, you know. But there were some people on both sides who liked to push buttons a little bit too much. Here's the story of how we almost evaporated the mankind from the face of the Earth.

Spycraft: The Great Game is an adventure game that puts you in the shoes of a rookie CIA agent involved in a conspiracy much greater than he could ever imagine. The game creates an disturbingly believable image of the cold war thanks to the substantial input from actual ex-heads of CIA and KGB. Spycraft's original gameplay combines classic adventure, investigative fiction, and puzzles that form an authentic experience of a cold-war spy struggle. The multitude of FMV cinematics brings even more flare to this ambitious title, that no adventure fan or conspiracy hunter can afford to miss!

Become a CIA agent and prevent two nations' mutual nuclear destruction in Spycraft: The Great Game, for only $5.99 (that's almost nothing compared to the actual CIA budget!).
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Tarhiel: A-HA! Now I feel like Benny, the guard from Thief :) Okay, but I´ll try the Undying nonetheless :)
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Titanium: Nice clean, unsoiled pants you've got there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to them.
Oooooooh, I seee :)
I played it as a kid, but I didn't know English and just hated it, maybe I'll get it someday just to see what did I miss back then.
Now I am much happier about both of today's GOG releases, as the retail versions that I have seem to have serious issues with newer PCs, at least I do.

Spycraft has the normal 16-bit installer problem. On 32bit WinXP, it seems to run ok, albeit it always complains there that it can't initialize the sound hardware. But at least I hear digital sounds. And I had to change desktop to 16-bit colors before the game would run at all.

Powerslide (the original retail, version 1.00 or 1.04), on the other hand, seems to be pretty much impossible to run on anything else but real Win9x. On both XP and Win7 on two different machines, it either complains about not being compatible with NT, or just crashes with any compatibility modes.

If the GOG versions run ok, I might end up getting both. Good job, GOG.
Nice, an old FMV game! These are not easily made compatible with newer systems. Good call!
Also hope to see Frankenstein (with Tim Curry) some day.
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BreOl72: You're a reporter, you're familiar with the term "MAD", right? Yes, Mutual Assured Destruction.

Sidenote: in Germany MAD stands for "Militärischer Abschirmdienst (military Counterintelligence). It's the third german intelligence agency besides the BND and the BfV.
Its core functions are the collecting and analysing of informations, for the purposes of espionage / sabotage defense and extremism / terrorism defense..
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Ubivis: I thought MAD stads for "MAD Magazine" everywhere?
America isn't everywhere. ;)
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Titanium: A great addition! I played this game quite a bit back when it came out. I even still have the CDs.
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Tarhiel: There was Spycraft 2?
Not answering your question, a fun predecessor of Spycraft is <i>KGB</i>, a.k.a Conspiracy. It was an interesting and extremely hard cold war espionage game set in Russia. Look it up if you're interested in spycraft as a genre. Come to think of it, I'll community-wishlist it now too...
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JudasIscariot: ...
You too.
Post edited October 03, 2012 by RafaelLopez
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Ubivis: I thought MAD stads for "MAD Magazine" everywhere?
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amcdermo: America isn't everywhere. ;)
But MAD Magazine "was" also very famous in Germany, when I was young :)
Herbert Feuerstein published the german version, which was really nice :)
According to the booklet the game is from 1997. Add you are right. It was one of the (few) first DVD games: WC4, Starfleet Academy and Zork Grand Inquistor...I guess that's it in 1997.

Spycraft DVD is hard to get. I seached for along time and finally found it on ebay.

I had always hoped that the MCI wrapper written for WC4 would finally be able to play this game...but until now nothing has happened.
Ok thanks for that, i have some old retro PC's from the 90's with DVD drives, could you please give me instructions on how i would get the DVD version to work?....will it use a software MPEG-2 decoder or do you need a MPEG-2 decoder card?

Yes i have WC4 off GOG, looks great, really wish GOG could of had the DVD version of Spycraft The Great Game on here, question for anyone from GOG, do you have any plans in the future to have the DVD version available?
Post edited October 04, 2012 by Neilk40
Wishlisted.
These are the games I'd like to see a GOG reissue every day. There's just soooo many!
Ok thanks for that, i have some old retro PC's from the 90's with DVD drives, could you please give me instructions on how i would get the DVD version to work?....will it use a software MPEG-2 decoder or do you need a MPEG-2 decoder card?

Yes i have WC4 off GOG, looks great, really wish GOG could of had the DVD version of Spycraft The Great Game on here, question for anyone from GOG, do you have any plans in the future to have the DVD version available?
I got it running using a virtual pc a long time ago. But I did NOT need a decoder card. Instead I used a a software decoder, possibly mediamatics dvd express. It is an old decoding software, which also enables DVD playback on Zork Grand Inquisitor and Tender Loving Care.

It is really a shame, that gog used the easiest way of getting it running. I mean, I can do better DosBox configs than they do, with my own installer, etc. What I can NOT do is rewritting early Win95 software using exotic solutions. But I guess it is to expensive for them do relocate a lot of ressources towards rather unknown games :(
Post edited October 05, 2012 by Silver83
Thanks Silver83, you seem to really know your stuff. :)

Yes instead of using a retro PC i could use Virtual PC on modern hardware, looks like all i need then is that software MPEG-2 decoder.

Yes it's a shame they couldn't of used the MCI wrapper that they used for Wing Commander 4 for this release but Wing Commander has a much bigger community and the MCI wrapper for WC4 was done by someone on the Wing Commander CIC forum, seems like only us two are interested in the DVD release of this Great Game :)

I looked on ebay.com and ebay.co.uk and there are plenty of Spycraft - The Great Game CD versions but no DVD version so looks like it will be hard to get.
Post edited October 05, 2012 by Neilk40
Thank GOG for releasing Spycraft. I had played it so long ago and wished so badly to play it again. The tools you can use are soooo cool hehe.
Game is playing smoothly except for one thing. When in fullscreen it doesn't recognise my touchpad (i'm playing on a laptop). But if I go with alt+enter it's fine (problem is, it's a small window sadly so not very good to play with). Wnyone know what might be going badly here? I'm running Vista 7 home premium SP1, 64 bits, normal resolution is 1366x768. thanks ppl.
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shadi.lahham: really excited about this!
Still have the boxed copy!

I remember it was an amazing game at the time, very different.
You get lots of neat 'toys' to play with, most quite simple, but each very unique.
Made me feel like I work in a CIA office.

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RafaelLopez: Not answering your question, a fun predecessor of Spycraft is <i>KGB</i>, a.k.a Conspiracy. It was an interesting and extremely hard cold war espionage game set in Russia. Look it up if you're interested in spycraft as a genre. Come to think of it, I'll community-wishlist it now too...
Youtube clip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxtpmARJ9-0
That one looks like it could fill up weeks of free time :)
Bookmarked and added vote vor the community wishlist here, thanks.
Just out of curiosity: why is it that we often dont get the dvd-version on GOG? Like the Tex Murphy game it is the cd-version...