87. Spy Vs. Spy

(Various Home, First Star, 1984)
Spy vs Spy was MAD magazine's classic comic strip, detailing the war between two spies, identical in looks save for one decked out in white and the other in black. The nameless protagonists battled back and forth with various traps and tricks with great slapstick violence results.
The author, Antonio Prohias, was a Cuban citizen who fled at the dawn of the 60s to America mere weeks before Fidel Castro took control of the press. Prohias worked on a variety of comic strips until his death in 1998.

The Spy vs Spy video game was available on NES, Spectrum, Commodore, Gameboy, Master system, Amiga and many others. Essentially a two player game, each player controlled one of the spies in a split screen environment, The players would run around various sized office blocks and search furniture for a selection of spy related goodies and a briefcase, upon finding all the items, the player must then find the door to the runway to make his getaway by plane.
The violence came in a variety of booby traps players could arrange in order to slow down, or steal items from, the other player. These contraptions included bombs, springs, buckets of acid, guns wired to doors and more. Thus ensues a cat and mouse chase through the building, finding the items and incapacitating the opponent.

The game was very fun to play in two player, but fairly pointless alone. Sadly, time has not fared Spy vs Spy well. Today the game feels a bit hollow and although its always worth a run through with a friend for classic nostalgia LoLs, it doesn't hold attention the way it used to, one game is usually more than enough and anyone playing th egame for the first time may be left wondering what all the fuss was about.

However, Spy vs Spy was a faithful recreation of the comic book and at the time a fantastic two player game, the satisfaction of watching your opponent walk blindly into your traps before stealing his hard earned briefcase was huge and could lead to much smugness (and real life violence)