Spycraft: The Great Game

CIA Credo: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
Opening Voiceover: "Kipling called it 'The Great Game'. You want to win, remember one thing: everything you know could be a lie."

Note: This article is not about the Tabletop Game Spycraft.

As CIA agent Thorn, your work for the Secret Service will see you preventing assassinations and rooting out traitors, but this spy doesn't storm fortresses and sip martinis. Your work involves sifting evidence, joining the threads and getting the job done with surveillance intel, analysis and quick wits, not force of arms.

Spycraft: The Great Game is an adventure game produced by Activision in 1996, with the coordination of former CIA director William Colby and former KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin. While the CIA itself does not endorse the game, the contribution of these men leads to a much more realistic portrayal of life in security services, where a piece of security footage rather than forceful intervention is the main task of the intelligence services.

While there are a few limited action scenes to break up the flow, the player spends most of his time analysing information using various software tools available to Thorn, such as matching faces and decrypting coded messages. Navigation of areas and tools is carried out in a format similar to the Phoenix Wright games.

Tropes used in Spycraft: The Great Game include:
  • Awesomeness By Analysis: This is basically the player job description: Apply information to track down killers and expose deceptions.
  • British Accent: Blake has one, and fits the stereotype by living in a country mansion and drinking tea. Also an Evil Brit.
  • Caught on Tape
  • Chekhov's Gun: A lot of information only becomes relevant later, but the big ones are the "Pyramid" and the "Soundhack" devices, both of which are introduced very early on and not used until the finale.
  • Deus Ex Machina: The player is saved when Procat Leader Blake's gun jams at a crucial moment.
  • The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Having a stun grenade thrown into the room in which your frail hostage-friend is being held will kill the poor man.
  • Engineered Public Confession
  • Falling Into the Cockpit: Your instructor's death leads to rookie agent Thorn leading an investigation into the assassination of the president. Actually justified when it is revealed the mole was responsible for this arrangement.
  • Fate Worse Than Death: More like banished into obscurity. Make too many mistakes and you'll be kicked off the case and operations, and sent to the CIA World Factbook department.
  • Guide Dang It: Sometimes a key detail is buried in one of many files and booklets you can find.
  • Grey and Grey Morality: The game offers a number of dubious methods of extracting information through force or threats (though the game does verbally discourage the former and remind you of the breach of ethics involved).
    • Worse still in the ending you are required to decide whether to compromise the nation's interests and allow a corrupt pro-American politician to be arrested, or to follow orders and kill the man trying to bring him to justice to conceal the truth. If you choose the former, you are revealed to have basically allowed another Cold War.
  • Heel Face Turn: Churbanov, unhappy with his publicity officer's assassination plan, leaks some useful information to the player.
  • Impossibly Cool Weapon: The assassins seem to prefer bordering-on-sci-fi weapon prototypes, such vibration guns that cause coronary arrest, to anything normal for their hits, making them much easier to track down as a result.
    • Justified in that part of the point is to use these silent guns to kill in crowded places so they can't be found afterwards.
  • Instant Death Bullet: Despite what your instructors may say, multiple shots are not required in action scenes, and during cutscenes a single body shot will drop anyone.
  • Loads and Loads of Characters: It can sometimes be tricky keeping track of all the names of your fellow agents and targets, given the number of named characters.
  • The Mole
  • Moral Dilemma: Only a few, but the realism makes them pretty weighty. Do you order the terrified, pacifistic informant commit murder to prove his loyalty to the bad guys for the sake of more info? Do you kill a law-enforcer and ally for threatening to expose a state ally's misdemeanours?
  • Multiple Endings: Save the president, fail to save the president, retrieve the nuclear pit, don't retrieve the nuclear pit, get killed by Procat operatives, fail to join Procat, join Procat and assassinate the President of the United States.
  • Nonstandard Game Over
  • Oh Crap: "Whoever you are you are making a big mistake. The self-destruct sequence has been activated. Goodbye."
  • Red Herring
  • Rogue Agent: Procat is a whole organisation of these.
  • Unexpected Gameplay Change: Typically after solving a puzzle, you expect to receive a video e-mail from your boss telling you what puzzle you need to do next. When you calculate the location of your mole after he goes on the run, you instead control a special ops team to rescue him clearing a building room-by-room with a completely new interface.
  • What an Idiot!: The bad guys will give the player one of these if you accept an offer to join their terrorist organisation and fail their test.
  • Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him: Averted in that you can sometimes attempt to interrupt a speech with your gun, but if it is important enough that they will probably have a gun on you, making it inadvisable to try.
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