Sid Meier's Covert Action Crypto Workstation

A 1-to-1 pixel-perfect remake of the classic Sid Meier's Covert Action spy thriller code-cracking, text deciphering puzzle minigame.

Controls:
A-Z:   Selects a letter to guess, press again to select your answer.
F1:      Solves a letter for you, skips clock forward 1 "hour."
F5:      Restart, generate a new message to decode.

Sid Meier's Covert Action is an often forgotten 1990 game developed and self-published by Sid Meier's team at MicroProse. Featuring a complex web of procedurally generated criminal plots, the game involves the player, as Maxine or Maximilian Remington, foiling real-world criminal and terrorist organization's attempts.

Originally featuring four primary spy-themed activities and much globe-trotting, this contains only a 1:1, pixel-perfect, remake of the Cryptography portion (upscaled 3x) with the original sound effects.

The full game can be purchased on GoG and Steam. My personal preference being the GoG version, which is much more faithfully preserved, including clean copies of the original paper documents that were released with the game, that are buried within the files of the Steam version. The original game contains much more complexity in its systems, in classic Sid Meier fashion, and is worth playing.

The current version of this remake does not showcase the intertwined systems found in the original game, and is akin to the isolated training mode found in the original. The original would generate more complex messages which tied into the specific items, people, and places you would interact with in an investigation. The original animations have not been programmed into the current version but were fairly simple to begin with. The original had four different difficulty levels which added complications to the puzzle. In this version the code is simply a random 1:1 character cypher.

GoG: https://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_covert_action
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/327390/Sid_Meiers_Covert_Action_Classic/

Geopolitics portrayed in-game, in context:

The organizations presented by the game were preserved directly from the original game and are not strictly correct in modern times. The original game attempted to represents the fantasy perspective of a western intelligence agency and does not depict these organizations with complete accuracy. For example, the term "Muslim Jihad" is used in an incorrect, offensive way and is not necessarily an organization. The game manual elaborates further and more specifically refers to the organization in-game as the "Pro-Iranian Lebanese fundamentalist group" specifically responsible for the murder of the American University President, in Beirut, which in actuality had the name of "Islamic Jihad Organization" or "IJO". The game is from an era when reading the manual to get the complete story context was common, and it was portraying these groups with the spy thriller genre and a classic James Bond-like fantasy in mind. Although this is explained, it is not fully justifiable and would be completely inexcusable in a modern professionally produced game. My priority has been to preserve the gameplay and presentation of the original to the best of my abilities, and therefore, I have opted to use the exact text strings found in the original game files. The specifics of the historical inaccuracies are not my personal field of expertise, and I would be doing a disservice to poorly attempt to bring the game up to higher standards.

Cheat sheet:

List of Organizations:
Disclaimer:  These organizations were preserved directly from the original game and are the exact text strings used in the game. They are not strictly correct in a historical or political sense. In the original game files, they are grouped into Group A, which is primarily European, Group B which is a mix of African and Middle Eastern lumped together, and Group C which is primarily Central and South American.

        Local Contact
        CIA
        MI6
        Mossad
        KGB
        PFO
        Red Army
        UnionCorsique
        Stassi
        Iraqi SP
        PIFA
        Red Battalion
        Mafia
        Libyan Emb.
        Direct Action
        Marxists
        Red September
        PRC
        Rev. Guards
        Muslim Jihad
        Mercenaries
        Haitian Junta
        FLN
        Tupamaros
        Amazon Cartel
        Jamaican Gang
        Colombian Ctl
        M18
        Shining Way
        Dignity Bttn
        Death Squads

List of Locations:

        Amman
        Amsterdam
        Washington
        Athens
        Baghdad
        Beirut
        Belgrade
        Berlin
        Bogota
        Budapest
        Cairo
        Caracas
        Damascus
        Geneva
        Havana
        Helsinki
        Kingston
        London
        Los Angeles
        Madrid
        Managua
        Medellin
        Mexico City
        Miami
        Moscow
        Nassau
        Panama
        Paris
        Prague
        Rio
        Riyadh
        Rome
        San Juan
        Tehran
        Tel Aviv
        Tripoli
        Vienna

Coded in GameMaker Studio 1.4 by Adam Awad (@AdamUnavailable)
Created December 2018, Published February 2022.


TOOLS USED:

GameMaker Studio
    by YoYo Games
    http://yoyogames.com/
    (GAME ENGINE)

Audacity
    by Audacity Team
    https://www.audacityteam.org/
    (FOR EDITING AUDIO)

JCivED - a toolbox for Civilization
    by darkpanda
    https://sourceforge.net/projects/jcived/
    (FOR RIPPING FONT)

DRO Trimmer
    by laurence dougal myers
    http://www.jestarjokin.net/apps/drotrimmer/
    (FOR RIPPING RAW MUSIC)

MISC:
   GOG (FOR THE GAME)
   DOSBOX (FOR EMULATING THE GAME)
   MicroProse (ORIGINAL PUBLISHER)
   Sid Meier / Developers