In MAD magazine’s Spy vs Spy, two pointy-nosed secret agents, one in black and one in white, spend every strip blowing each other up. Neither ever wins for long, and neither ever stops watching the other. Mike Riedel built his 1984 game around that second point. “The first thing you notice in the strip is the fact that the spies are always watching one another,” he told Electronic Games, so a game where players took turns would not do. “Who wants to sit waiting, while the other player walks around laying snares?” Instead he split the screen in two. Both players search the same embassy at the same time, each in their own half of the picture, and each can see exactly what the other is up to. Electronic Games made it Game of the Month and suggested that among competitive two-player computer games it was “perhaps, the best one ever designed”.
Fast facts
- Designer and programmer: Mike Riedel.
- Publisher: First Star Software, New York; in Britain, Beyond Software.
- Based on: Spy vs Spy, Antonio Prohías’s wordless strip for MAD.
- First released: 1984, for the Commodore 64; Riedel then wrote the Apple II and Atari 8-bit versions.
- Players: one against the computer, or two at once on a split screen.
- Sequels: Spy vs Spy II: The Island Caper (1985) and Spy vs Spy III: Arctic Antics (1986).
The game
The two spies have broken into a foreign embassy. To win, a spy has to find a passport, travelling money, a key and the secret plans, hidden behind the furniture in its rooms, carry them in a briefcase and leave through the one exit to the airport before the plane takes off. Each spy can carry only one thing in his hands, which is why the briefcase matters. The size of the embassy is chosen before each game. Electronic Games found at least nine rooms in the original; CRASH counted from six to 36 in the Spectrum version. At the harder settings the embassy has two floors, joined by ladders.
The white spy is always played by a person and fills the top half of the screen; the black spy, below, can be a second player or the computer, whose cunning is set on a scale of one to five. CRASH liked that touch: “this allows you to play against a pretty thick opponent and work your way up to something a bit smarter than your average KGB goon.” When both spies walk into the same room, the two halves give way to one shared view, each spy is handed a club, and they fight. The winner can take the loser’s haul.
The Trapulator
To the right of each half of the screen sits the Trapulator, a panel of six buttons that also shows the spy’s clock and what he is carrying. Five of the buttons are traps; the sixth calls up a map of the embassy. Riedel had started with six traps, he said, “but it soon became obvious that people couldn’t orient themselves within the rooms unaided, so the sixth key became the map.” The player picks a trap, walks up to a desk, a cabinet or a door, waits for a white flash that shows the spot is right, and presses the button to hide it.
Every trap except the time bomb has a remedy, hidden in the same place in every embassy. The instructions printed when CRASH gave the Spectrum version away on its cover tape in 1991 listed them:
| Trap | Where it goes | Remedy | Where the remedy is kept |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bomb | Behind or inside furniture | Bucket of water | Red fire box |
| Spring | Behind or inside furniture | Wire cutters | Tool box |
| Bucket of water | On a closed door | Umbrella | Coat rack |
| Gun with a string tied to the trigger | On a closed door | Scissors | First-aid box |
| Time bomb | Goes off where it is set, after 15 seconds | None | — |
A spy carrying the right remedy walks through the trap unharmed. A spy without it is blown up, soaked or shot, and loses precious seconds, since each spy has his own clock. The traps tend to be what players remember. When a spy is electrocuted, his skeleton shows for a moment before he goes up in smoke, and he then sprouts wings and flutters away while the other spy laughs. The spring was a late addition, Riedel said, “but it worked out very well. In fact, if you set it up right, the spy can be sent flying through room after room, until he finally hits a wall!”
Setting traps mattered as much as searching. Riedel’s advice to Electronic Games readers was to find a remedy and then booby-trap the room it was in, and to close doors behind them, so that every closed door might be hiding something. A spy who gave up searching altogether could lie in wait and ambush the one who had done the work. Riedel had seen that coming at the exit: the door to the runway stays hidden until all four items are in the briefcase, so that one spy cannot simply guard it. A spy who tries to leave without them meets a bouncer. One who gets out with them climbs into a small plane, which flies out of his half of the screen, over the Trapulator and away.
Making it
Riedel had been reading MAD “for as long as I can remember”, he told Edge in 2007, and Spy vs Spy was his favourite strip: “this was a dream come true.” He had dropped out of college after selling an Apple II game, Bug Battle, and had worked for Atari until its New York office closed. First Star Software, a New York publisher founded in 1982 by Fernando Herrera, was by then linked to Warner Software, and MAD also belonged to Warner. Electronic Games reported that Riedel had four months to finish the game instead of the usual six to eight. “The whole development process only took a few months,” he remembered, working round the clock on what he called “a souped-up Apple II”. Memory was so tight that at one point he went through his source code deleting the comments to make room for more code. He drew the graphics with his own art program on the Commodore 64, and worked with a musician on the music.
The game was launched at a reception in the lobby of Warner Communications’ New York office, which Computer and Video Games attended in disguise. Prohías was there. He had left Cuba, where he drew cartoons against Fidel Castro, and began drawing the spies for MAD at the start of the 1960s. Riedel counted meeting him at the launch, and having dinner with MAD’s writers and artists, among “the most memorable moments from that time”.
In Britain
Beyond Software published Spy vs Spy in Britain, on the Commodore 64 first, at £9.95 on cassette and £11.95 on disk. By June 1985 it was eighth in Zzap!64‘s readers’ chart. The Spectrum version, converted by Tag and the Kid, reached CRASH in August 1985. To avoid the Spectrum’s colour clash, the conversion drew the rooms in black and white, which one reviewer found “does not detract from the overall feel of the game”. Another had not had so much fun with a game for as long as he could remember: “Let there be no doubt that bloke in the dark mac brings out the worst in me.” CRASH gave it 93% overall, and its readers voted it to fourth in the Hotline chart by November. The Beyond Software entry covers the label.
Sequels and later versions
Riedel wrote the sequel himself. Spy vs Spy II: The Island Caper (1985) moved the spies to a Caribbean island, where they dig for the parts of a missile among quicksand and sharks and fight with swords; Edge reported that it used “several traps and ideas left out of the original”. Zzap!64 reviewed it in October 1985 and found the “Simulvision and Simulplay features” intact. First Star announced the third game, Spy vs Spy III: Arctic Antics, at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1986 at $29.95 for the Commodore 64. Amiga Action noted in 1989 that the only difference between the second and third games “is the backdrop; the gameplay is exactly the same”.
The first game spread to most home computers and to consoles. When Mean Machines reviewed the Nintendo Entertainment System version in 1990, it called it “a near perfect copy of the original Spy vs Spy”. Retro Gamer’s list of versions in 2006 ran from the Commodore 64 and Spectrum through the Amstrad CPC, MSX, BBC Micro, Atari ST, Amiga, Sega Master System and Game Boy Color, and added two later games: Spy vs Spy: Operation Boobytrap for the Game Boy (1992) and a new Spy vs Spy for the Xbox (2005).
Riedel went on to make licensed games with characters from Sesame Street, Warner Brothers, Disney and Hanna-Barbera, and a decade later designed the Postal games. Looking back in 2007, he said of Spy vs Spy: “Too bad the internet wasn’t around back then because it would have been ideal for that gameplay.”
Sources
- Electronic Games volume 3 number 1, January 1985, pp. 60–64: Game of the Month review (Apple, Atari and Commodore 64 disk; the items; the split screen and the shared fighting view; at least nine rooms; the Trapulator; remedies for every trap except the time bomb; “perhaps, the best one ever designed”); “The Care and Feeding of a Hot License” (four months instead of six to eight; the spies “always watching one another”; the sixth key becoming the map; the spring trap; the electrocution, the wings and the airport; Riedel’s own art program on the C-64); “Mike Riedel’s Hints for Novice Secret Agents”.
- Computer and Video Games issue 39, January 1985, pp. 31–32: the launch reception at Warner Communications’ New York office; Prohías and Castro; Fernando Herrera founding First Star in 1982; First Star’s affiliation with Warner Software; Beyond’s Commodore 64 release and competition.
- Zzap!64 issue 2, June 1985: readers’ Top 20 (number 8; Beyond, £9.95 cassette, £11.95 disk).
- CRASH issue 19, August 1985, p. 24: Spectrum review (Beyond, £9.95, Tag and the Kid; six to 36 rooms; computer IQ one to five; the remedies; 93% overall). CRASH issue 22, November 1985: Hotline Top 30.
- Zzap!64 issue 6, October 1985, p. 112: Spy vs Spy II: The Island Caper review.
- Compute!’s Gazette issue 39, September 1986: Consumer Electronics Show report (Arctic Antics, Commodore 64, $29.95; First Star Software, 18 E. 41st St., New York).
- Amiga Action issue 3, December 1989, p. 32: The Island Caper and Arctic Antics.
- Mean Machines issue 2, November 1990, p. 42: NES review.
- CRASH issue 93, October 1991: Powertape instructions for Spy vs Spy (the traps, their remedies and where the remedies are kept; the 15-second time bomb; four items and a briefcase).
- Retro Gamer issue 30 (2006), p. 41: Craig Grannell on Spy vs Spy II, with the list of versions and later games.
- Edge issue 173, March 2007, pp. 97–99: “The Making of… Spy Vs Spy” (Riedel on MAD, Bug Battle and Atari; a few months’ development on a “souped-up Apple II”; deleting comments; the musician; the Apple II and Atari ports and The Island Caper; meeting Prohías; later licensed games and Postal).