How Papers, Please And Real Events Inspired Alternate ‘80s Narco Thriller Vice Undercover

If you haven’t heard about Vice Undercover already, it’s a point-and-click set in an alternate ‘80s Miami where the internet already exists. In this narco thriller, you take on the role of Vida, an undercover cop pretending to be a hacker who works for the cartel. And if you haven’t heard about me already, you should know that that first hyphenated word string is enough to get me hooked.

You’ll be getting to grips with the Amigo OS, a fictional retro operating system, delving into various programs and files as you uncover secrets for both the cartel and the police, and aiming to balance your real job with your undercover role.

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Vice Undercover was one of my favourite games from Gamescom earlier this year, but the new demo allowed me more time to live out my dreams of hacker extraordinaire. I wish I could say it went absolutely flawlessly and that I’m clearly in the wrong career as a journo. But I failed. A lot.

It’s something I confess to Ancient Machine Games co-CEO Cos Lazouras. He tells me those first two days in the demo are the easiest, and that by the time you get to season three or four, you’ll have eight people giving you missions simultaneously and you have to figure out what to prioritise.

Lazouras tells me the game is meant to be “super, super stressful and frustrating”. However, the team plans to implement checkpoints so that you don’t have to reset the whole day when you fail. As someone who failed day two numerous times at the very end and had to redo the whole shebang each time, I was relieved to hear this. Ancient Machine will also be adding an option for players to add more time if they find themselves in a pinch, though that will disable Achievements.

From Papers, Please To Lawyer To Undercover Cop

Lazouras tells me Ancient Machine was founded to explore “genres that really have done really well, but [are] underserviced.” As the original team of three at Ancient Machine were big fans of Papers, Please, their first idea was to create something similar.

“The initial idea was you were a lawyer looking through legal stuff. We realized that’s really boring.” So that was when they pivoted to the idea of an undercover cop. “We did a little mock-up demo. It wasn’t photographic. It was very much in the vein of Papers, Please. It felt fun, but there was no real backstory.”

The initial concept was pure gameplay. You were an undercover cop pretending to be a hacker and working through contracts. You chose which you prioritised, factoring in the pay for each one while balancing your budget to keep your little undercover cop group show on the road.

“It was very similar in some ways, and extremely different in others,” Lazouras tells me. The first iteration was a four-hour game, where if you failed on any given day, you would go right back to the beginning like an old-school game over.

By the time Lazouras got involved with the team, with his 35 years of experience working in Hollywood, he knew they needed to add something more to the game. “It’s all about the narrative,” he tells me. From there, it took the team an additional year to refine the idea to what it is now.

Vice Undercover will challenge your ethics, with Lazouras warning me “it’s that moral sort of ambiguity of you are doing horrible stuff in order to look for a greater good service.” There will be times that you have to make a choice with serious repercussions, and it’s up to you whether you try to stay Good Cop, or whether you lean more into your role of cartel hacker.

When building the narrative, the team started with a specific twist and then designed the game to service that more. “We just kept introducing more and more layers of narrative and subplots, red herrings and then there are branch points to the story as well where you have different endings.”

You’re targeting the head of the cartel, but there are five other big players you deal with, and before long the team realised Vice Undercover would work even better if it were presented as a TV show box set. “It became obvious that we should just do a season for each of these characters and then bring it together in a finale. Then it was just like, ‘Okay, well, that’s essentially a box set of a TV show.’ so then we really leaned into the cinematic idea of it.”

Lazouras tells me Vice Undercover was also written as a TV show at one point and that there was “a really huge actress” involved who had once done a similar movie role, saw the similarities between the two projects, and saw Vice Undercover as “an opportunity to build out another world in that kind of genre”. The team is still “talking to several people” about branching Vice Undercover into other media, but for now, the game is the main focus.

Creating An Alternate History 1980s

My impression of PCs from the 1980s are chunky beasts with no mouse, just a black screen with horrid green text. Lazouras, having grown up in the ‘80s, laughs when I tell him this and explains “we did have colour”, but admits that the BBS boards were just as I imagined.

Vice Undercover aims to “give you the tone of the ‘80s rather than replicate it completely”, but that wasn’t always the case. There was one point of development where the game started with a machine that ran quite slow, and the idea was that as you earned more money, you could buy more RAM and upgrade apps so that it wouldn’t take too long to load pictures.

He admits “in hindsight, it’s clearly a stupid thing to have done” as although it “replicated the real ‘80s and what was actually happening with computers at the time. From a gameplay perspective, it was harder at the beginning than it was later on because your machine started going faster.”

The accuracy is there for the late ‘80s into early ‘90s, he promises, suggesting it’s close to Windows 3.1. “It’s very much in line with the ‘80s tech in some ways, and then a very stylised modern take on it and others. Some of the technology was more early ‘90s. And in the 2000s, the AIM and all the instant messaging stuff came later, email, obviously.”

Vice Undercover draws inspiration from real-world events and blends fact and fiction to create an engaging world and narrative. Some characters and plot points are inspired by real counterparts, such as Kevin Mitnick being the basis for Vice Undercover’s hacker Astra. Other elements are pulled straight from history, such as the inclusion of Robert Schifreen, the first ever person to be convicted of hacking.

Lazouras tells me any real people and names used are the result of working directly with that person, like Schifreen. Other real world stuff that’s alluded to or used for inspiration was only used “if it services the narrative”.

“There’s a storyline about one of the really horrible cartel people that you’re after, and it’s quite brutal,” Lazouras says. “This guy ended up having an affair with a rival cartel leader’s wife. There ended up being this war. What happened is that he just saw this as a fling, she kind of fell in love. He ended up tossing her and her kids off of a bridge. So when we were looking at all of these horrible events, everything from that to real data, like the logic bomb thing, is a factual piece of information.”

Another part of the game takes place in the UK, as the cartel is trying to track down someone in hiding in London. Lazouras explains they chose an address three doors down from where Margaret Thatcher lived, as they needed a property with an armed police guard. Vida hires a bunch of football hooligans to start a riot against the police guard to ensure the cartel can’t get close to the person they’re hunting. As it’s set in 1985 in the game, the team took inspiration from the Luton riot that happened after the Luton Town vs Millwall football match, using one of the players as inspiration for their hooligan leader.

“There’s loads of stuff based on real events and then there are real events that have inspired made up stories. There’s tons and tons of background info. There’s a heist that happens in Paris in the Jewellery District, and that’s based on the Antwerp Jewellery Heist. And again, some of the names of the people, if you knew, you can see the acronyms in our characters.”

Some familiar faces will cameo in the game as different characters, such as Ulf Andersson, the CEO of Ten Chambers and the creator of Payday and GTFO, and Argonaut Games’ Jez San. Vice Undercover also stars Colombian actress Kimberly Reyes (El Final del Paraíso) as protagonist Vida, while Tamer Hassan (The Football Factory and Layer Cake) asked to be involved after seeing the project, leading Lazouras to rewrite one of the central characters specifically for him.

Lazouras reminds me Ancient Machine is a “micro company” with him and Albert Ramon at the helm, with help from a few others and contract workers. The team have called in a lot of favours and had help from industry friends and various talent to help build the game, with Lazouras saying, “It’s great how many people have supported us as a little indie and it’s made the game so much better as well.”

If you want to test your hacker mettle, Vice Undercover will launch in early 2025 and you can find out more about it and wishlist it over on Steam.

Simulation

Adventure

Thriller

Systems

Developer(s)

Ancient Machine

Publisher(s)

Ancient Machine

Engine

Unity