The Great Escape (Ocean Software, 1986)

Designed and written for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum by John Heap.

Amstrad CPC version by James Software Ltd.

Commodore 64 version by Denton Designs:
Programming by Trevor Inns; Graphics by Trevor Inns and Steve Wahid.

All the above versions released in Europe by Ocean Software in 1986, and the C64 version released in North America by Thunder Mountain in 1986. Also released as "Escape" in Germany.

Enterprise 128 version also released by Ocean Software in 1986, but no details are known.

IBM-PC conversion by Malcolm J. Herd for Denton Designs, and published by Ocean and Thunder Mountain in 1987.

Unofficial Atari 400/800 conversion based on the C64 release written and released to
public domain in 2015.
Programming by Mariusz Wojcieszek
Loading screen and graphics by José Pereira
Title screen by Filippo Santellocco
Music by Marek Pešout
Sound effects by Bartlomiej Wieczorkowski

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INTRODUCTION & GAME STATUS

In further attempt at bringing more balance out of the C64 reign on this blog, I decided to take a deeper look at The Great Escape, which was among the first games I ever had for my own C64. Because at the time, I was disappointed in the game being black-and-white, slow and almost soundless, I never really got to enjoy the game for what it does offer. Later on, I have become to appreciate the design choices, but I have yet to fully understand what makes The Great Escape tick. So, this is also an attempt at finally getting my head around and into the game that is considered a classic by many.

I recall this game was high on some gaming magazine top 20 lists in 1986 and 1987, and it found its way to a few hugely popular compilations to make it even better known. At everybody's current favourite haunts, the scores are as follows: Spectrum Computing has an insanely good 9.0 from 45 votes, which still compared to the original archived World of Spectrum score of 8.54 from 504 votes is plausible enough; the C64 version has a score of 7.61 from 127 votes; the two Amstrad ratings available are 16.18/20.00 at CPC-Power and 6/10 at CPC Game Reviews; and for the DOS version, I dug up three ratings - Abandonia has a user rating of 2.9 from 2095 votes, and a 4.0 for editor rating, and Home of the Underdogs has 8.63 from 94 votes. How's that for retro? As for the unofficial Atari 8-bit conversion, it has only been voted twice by Atarimania users, giving it a rating of 8.5, which is promising enough.

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DESCRIPTION & REVIEW

What we have here is an isometric adventure game, which you probably know I'm not very fond of, generally. For The Great Escape, Denton Designs decided to write themselves a game engine not dissimilar from Ultimate's Filmation, which was used for classics such as Knight Lore, Pentagram and Gunfright. Denton's Filmation variation engine was used later on and upgraded for the much more impressive Where Time Stood Still, which I have already made a comparison of some years ago.

The basic premise and idea for The Great Escape is taken largely from the 1963 movie of the same name, although there is no official connection, and our protagonist can hardly be called the spitting image of Steve McQueen. You do control an unnamed prisoner of war in a prisoner camp in Germany, 1942, and the idea is, rather obviously, to plan and execute a successful escape. The game has a day-to-night cycle, and all the prisoners, guards and soldiers follow a daily routine, yourself included, unless you take control of the prisoner. This is largely what deserved such massive praise from the gaming press when it was released, and to its credit, this feature hasn't really been replicated all that often since.

The Great Escape is a game that requires some patience, plenty of time for observation and figuring out what does what, and how long are your time frames for any action. So, while mainly an adventure game, there is also a good deal of strategizing involved, as well. It's a game that deserves its status, but requires some time to be put into in order to appreciate its finer qualities.

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LOADING

Although The Great Escape was primarily a cassette game, being a single-loader from a British game publisher and all that jazz, the three usual platforms all had disk releases as well - if not as a standalone release, then at least through some compilation or another. The DOS version obviously couldn't have been anything other than a floppy disk release, although the contents of it are easy enough to copy to a hard disk drive. As for the tape loading times...

AMSTRAD CPC - Original: 4 minutes 58 seconds
AMSTRAD CPC - Erbe: 5 minutes 14 seconds
COMMODORE 64 - Original: 4 minutes 2 seconds
COMMODORE 64 - Hit Squad: 10 minutes 2 seconds
ZX SPECTRUM - Original / Hit Squad: 3 minutes 47 seconds
ZX SPECTRUM - Portuguese: 5 minutes 25 seconds
ZX SPECTRUM - Erbe: 2 minutes 53 seconds

So, if you have a CPC or a C64, you're better off with the original release, which is actually the same loader, which most compilations used as well. For the SPECTRUM version, you might want to choose the Erbe re-release, although the original release is still quicker than either of the other two platforms' original tapes.

I found a version for the Enterprise 128 computer quite by accident and/or on a hunch, but wasn't able to run it, because the available images didn't work with my emulator, since they couldn't be read as either tape or disk. If anyone can help me out with that, throw in a comment.

Loading screens. Top row, left to right: Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Atari 400/800.
Bottom left: IBM-PC. Bottom right: Commodore 64.

I have always been a bit uncertain about the C64 version's loading screen. While it displays a rather good portait of a displeased man behind bars, it's also not exactly how the prisoners are kept in the camp in the game - unless you are taken to solitary. The other two loading screens only show the title in the middle of a bunch of barbed wire. Strangely, I couldn't get the DOS version's loading screen to appear, probably because I don't have a booter disk image file to play it from, so the loading screen was taken from MobyGames, which uses a different CGA colour scheme than the version I'm using for this comparison.

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PLAYABILITY

In isometric adventure games, there are basically two main control scheme variants, in which you either push the joystick up to move forward, and turn your character with left and right. Some games also give you the ability to jump. The Great Escape uses the other type: each main direction on your joystick or keyboard set-up moves you to one of the cardinal directions as chosen by the game's designer, as shown in the picture here.

According to the game's original manual, diagonals are also in use, but they don't actually do any different directions than what you get with the cardinal ones. What you can do with your joystick is pick up items by pressing the fire button and up simultaneously; drop items with fire and down; and use a held object with fire and left or right - as you can only have two items in your possession at any time, so they're kept in the left and right pockets.

Before we get into what the game is all about, we need to go through the controls in all five versions. In the SPECTRUM version, you get three optional joystick controllers - Kempston, Sinclair and Protek - and redefinable keyboard controls. The C64 version is played with a joystick in port 1.

What you should do in The Great Escape is follow the everyday patterns and goings on in the prison camp carefully, make notes of where the guards and the commandant move at any given time, and plan your movements accordingly. The pattern is rather simple, really, and you can follow it by not touching the controls until you feel secure in doing so. If you do take control, though, you are not able to perform simple tasks like lie down in bed or sit on a bench for breakfast, but if you let go of the controls for a while, your man will continue automatically with the usual program.

Each day, you are woken up by the bell, and after a while, everybody is summoned for the roll call. Next, breakfast - the only food of the day, really. Then you get the first free moment of the day, before you are called for exercise time in a separate caged structure. After a suitable period of time has passed, the bell rings to get everybody out of the exercise area, and some free roaming is possible again. Then, it's time for another roll call before turning in for the night. Although night time is really the only possible time to make your escape, you will have to equip yourself and plan the escape properly, and this requires plenty of roaming around in unsafe environments without anyone noticing. It truly is a stealth game before stealth games were a thing.

Although the game features a score indicator for telling you how well you're doing, the more important indicator is the morale flag, which when completely lowered, the controls are being taken from you completely, and the only option is to restart the game. The flag colour will be green (yellow in the AMSTRAD version), when you're within the routine's bounds, and red, when you're outside of the allowed area for each routine. The flag falls down, when you get caught doing something wrong, and Red Cross parcels and finding other items and useful things will raise the flag. The C64 and ATARI versions have no flag indicator, but a numeric morale indicator instead, which also turns red when you're out of the allowed area.

Basically, the game plays otherwise the same on all platforms. The main difference is speed, as it so often is in these isometric adventures. As users of DOSbox will know very likely, the IBM-PC version is possible to play at lightning speeds, depending on the (virtual) CPU speed, but the native PC computers of this age would have had an Intel 80286 processor. From the non-variable computers, the SPECTRUM version plays the fastest, and the most constantly high speed, and the latter-day ATARI version seems to run pretty much at the same speed. Obviously, the game does slow down when there are more people on the screen, even if you're playing on a 128k SPECTRUM. The only version not to suffer from slowdown, at least not particularly notably, is the IBM-PC version, but looking at the gameplay videos on YouTube, when the PC version is run with optimal speed, a complete day cycle is approximately 25 minutes, which is much more than either the SPECTRUM (12 minutes) or C64 (16.5 minutes), but still considerably less than the AMSTRAD version (36 minutes). The ATARI version manages to keep close to the SPECTRUM's day cycle with approximately 13 minutes.

The C64 version is slower than the SPECTRUM and ATARI versions to start with, and when the game progresses far enough to get you outside of the starting building, the slowdown is massive even without additional people on the screen - the speed is something like 4 or 5 frames per second. I might as well mention, that there was a 115% speed upgrade version of the C64 version released some years ago, but when compared to the SPECTRUM and ATARI versions, it's still sluggish, but not quite as badly as the original. The worst offender, however, is the AMSTRAD version, which plays at around 2-3 fps even at the best of times, so in order to make the game playable, use an emulator at turn the speed knob to 200%, if available. As it is, this is all I can really base my scoring on in this section, because there really is little else to report, unless there is some glaringly obvious differences in the non-playable characters' behaviour between versions, which can only be reported by those who have played The Great Escape on all platforms more than I can ever bother.

1. IBM-PC COMPATIBLES
2. SINCLAIR ZX SPECTRUM / ATARI 400/800
3. COMMODORE 64
4. AMSTRAD CPC

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GRAPHICS

Well, you're all aware that since The Great Escape is an old-school isometric adventure game, it means there won't be much colour featured in it. All those classic isometric adventures were monochromatic in their presentation, at least when it came to the action screen, and the side graphics were mostly monochromatic with different colours for several informational items. So, that's what you're getting here.

Screenshots from the Sinclair ZX Spectrum version.

The SPECTRUM original boots up to a control options menu screen, which already shows us the basic setup of the screen throughout the game. For starters, though, the morale flag on the left is raised to the top. The bottom row of the info area features, from left to right, a space for items in your inventory, the notification bell, and the score counter, which looks like a series of medals. Below the flag, the items and the bell, you can see messages appear every time a meaningful event occurs.

The action screen is surrounded by a barbed wire fence and four corner poles, all yellow. In daytime, the action is made with white graphics, regardless of where you are, apart from the tunnels. When the night falls, your room takes a cyan hue, the outside colours are dark blue and yellow for the spotlight, and anything going on in the tunnels is dark blue, at least before you find a torch to light the way. Since I haven't been able to get that far in the game yet, I don't have a screenshot for it.

Screenshots from the Amstrad CPC version.

All the action looks very similar, if considerably slower, in the AMSTRAD version, but the info area is completely yellow, unless you get a red flag. The contrast of colours is slightly deeper, but it's not too far from the original. The AMSTRAD version also uses a very stylized custom font for all the text, which strangely doesn't feel like they customized for the letters O and C, and even more oddly, the numbers in the score panel use a different font before you have started the game.

Screenshots from the Commodore 64 version.

Unfortunately, the C64 version loses the control options (and title) screen, so we don't have a full set here. For other downgrades, the flag morale indicator is switched to a simple numeric display, as if to save CPU calculation power, and similarly, the score display made of medals is switched to basic text in the font used also in the SPECTRUM version of the game. At least the bell and the barbed wire looks right. The action graphics are largely similar to the original, but during night time, we have light blue outside graphics instead of turqoise or dark blue, both of which are used for other, appropriate purposes.

Screenshots from the IBM-PC version.

For the IBM-PC version, there seems to be two different colour modes available, which shouldn't be a surprise, given the CGA does support a variety of colour modes, as long as there's four colours. Because the version I have only seems to be able to show the graphics in red-yellow-green-black, the other screenshots have been shamelessly snatched from MobyGames. Happily, all the graphical elements from the SPECTRUM original have been preserved for the PC version, but there's also that same weird score display bug as in the AMSTRAD version, that shows the zeroes in a completely different font in the title screen than during the rest of the game. While both colour modes feel a bit off, they're not all that distracting, when the action speed and scrolling is good, and since the original was also monochrome, the CGA graphics feel good enough.

Screenshots from the Atari 400/800 version.

Last, but certainly not least, the unofficial latter-day ATARI 400/800 version features a hilarious new title screen, basically scanned from the cover of the similarly titled PS2/PC/XB game from 2003, and also a separate credits screen, both of which are displayed before the actual game is loaded. I think it's a bit of a shame, that the info displays are taken straight from the C64 version, but at least they use some different colours. Uniquely, the ATARI version has a different hue for different areas: a grayscale look for the daytime outside areas, a red/sepia hue for the daytime inside areas, a dark blue hue for the inside and tunnel areas during nighttime and a brighter blue hue for the nighttime outside areas. Also, as a minor, but refreshing detail, the corner poles and the barbed wire surrounding the action screen are of a slightly different colour. The only problem that I would mention here is, that there seems to be either no spotlight at all during nights, or that the spotlight is corrupted, because there are some garbage lines flashing when I'm walking around outside at night.

With the advantage of time and knowledge, the ATARI version does feel like a slightly unfair achievement, even though it's not a completely bug-fixed version. It offers just that bit more graphical variety, which makes it a more interesting game to play on the long run, but on the other hand, it is missing most of the graphical elements from the info display area. In the form it currently is, I cannot in all honesty give the top spot, even though I would like to, because the SPECTRUM version just feels so perfectly designed in all ways. The PC version is a close second here, entirely due to the lack of colours, and the C64 and CPC versions take the last two places.

1. SINCLAIR ZX SPECTRUM
2. IBM-PC COMPATIBLES
3. ATARI 400/800
4. COMMODORE 64
5. AMSTRAD CPC

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SOUNDS

This is an interesting case, because what we start with is a funny distorted double-tempo version of the main theme from the movie The Great Escape, by Elmer Bernstein, and the only other sounds we get for the entirety of the game are, 1) the bell ringing for any sort of event starting, whether it's time to wake up, roll call - anything, really; and 2) a very short "blip" sound whenever some other character enters the room. The exact same set of sounds goes for the IBM-PC version, except that the pitch and speed of the sounds it entirely dependent on your (virtual) PC's processing power.

What makes this an interesting case is, that the C64 version has no music at all - just the bells and blips, although they have at least been made more authentically bellishly. Even worse, the AMSTRAD version has no sounds at all.

The comparatively recent ATARI version beats all these versions with the advantage of time and experience. After all of the above, they even managed to get the best sound effects designed from all versions, and as a way to implement proper music into the title screen/opening sequence, they made the actual game load after the title sequence to give the game more space to work after a memory wipe. So, the title sequence has the only multi-channel rendition of the Great Escape theme, and it also has the tempo closer to the original movie theme, rather than the hyper-speed you get in the SPECTRUM and IBM-PC versions.

1. ATARI 400/800
2. SINCLAIR ZX SPECTRUM / IBM-PC COMPATIBLES
3. COMMODORE 64
4. AMSTRAD CPC

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OVERALL + VIDEO

It sure feels good to have this finally done, and along with having made the comparison, I can finally say I understand this game - if not completely, then considerably more than I have done for the last 27 years. Now, the final Overall scores in the style of FRGCB are as follows:

1. IBM-PC COMPATIBLES: Playability 4, Graphics 4, Sounds 3 = TOTAL 11
1. SINCLAIR ZX SPECTRUM: Playability 3, Graphics 5, Sounds 3 = TOTAL 11
2. ATARI 400/800: Playability 3, Graphics 3, Sounds 4 = TOTAL 10
3. COMMODORE 64: Playability 2, Graphics 2, Sounds 2 = TOTAL 6
4. AMSTRAD CPC: Playability 1, Graphics 1, Sounds 1 = TOTAL 3

Despite the stupidly mathematical method of scoring here, I can fully agree on the results this time. The PC and SPECTRUM versions are just about equally good, but it helps the PC version a lot, that the game speed is practically adjustable. The SPECTRUM version just looks nicer. The new ATARI version was surprisingly good, whereas the C64 version just couldn't be saved even by the speed upgrade, and the AMSTRAD version just shouldn't be played on real hardware at all.

In case you're not sure whether to agree with me or not, here's a video featuring all five versions by yours truly, and in the unlikely case of getting to finally play the Enterprise version, I doubt this comparison will be updated for that reason.

As a reminder, or if you had no idea that The Great Escape had a sequel of sorts, at least in a spiritual sense, Denton Designs did write a game called Tibet for the 128k Spectrum a couple of years later, which was eventually released as Where Time Stood Still. I wrote a comparison of it no less than 11 years ago, so here's a link, if you want to have a little blast from the past.

Thanks for reading, I hope that was worth the bother! Looks like there might still be time for one more Ocean comparison, so let's see what happens!