This narrative thriller takes place in a fictional ’80s OS, and the devs obsessed over keeping just the right amount of old school jank: ‘We did retain the dial-up modem’

Few games commit to building an alternate reality like Vice Undercover. Much of the game is played on the fictitious Amigo OS, an amalgam of Windows 3.1 and early Apple operating systems with a dozen built-in applications, a boxy media player, and even a persistent Clippy pastiche with all sorts of eager advice for you. But this isn’t a starry-eyed trip down memory lane—it’s a “narco-thriller” where you poke around in drug cartel communications, careful not to get caught.

“Paranoia is one of the core emotions we were going for. That fear of being caught, the moral ambiguity of what you’re doing, and sort of questioning what is right and wrong when you’re combating something like this,” said Cos Lazouras, co-CEO of indie dev Ancient Machine, in an interview with PC Gamer. “That kind of thing is part and parcel with the core of the gameplay.”

In Vice, which takes place in 1980s Miami, you play as an undercover cop with an hour a day to access a cartel-run computer. It looks to be informed by synthwave and neo-noir as much as it is by actual history, and Lazouras said that’s no mistake; there are plenty of treats for web historians and true crime buffs alike.

“The idea of, ‘what would have happened if Pablo Escobar and other cartels like that in the ’80s had access to the sort of technology we take for granted?’ What does that world look like,” he said. “We did a lot of research about the drug wars of the ’80s, and Miami was the central focus of cocaine distribution into the country … we have every criminal organization in this game, sometimes peripherally, but we’ve got everything from the yakuza, triads, Indonesian mob, the Italian mafia, the police as a big part of the corruption, government agencies.”

As a narrative game, the closest analog to fiddling around in Amigo OS is probably something like Her Story or the recently acclaimed Roottrees are Dead. It’s a nonlinear web of discoveries lying in wait, scattered about databases full of disparate information. If you’re the sort who’s always wished you could puff a stogie and illustrate a series of connections on a bulletin board using tacks and yarn, that’s how I imagined myself while checking out its demo on Steam.

You might notice that the Amigo isn’t quite as frustrating to navigate as it could be given its inspirations. According to Ancient Machine’s other co-CEO, Albert Ramon Puig, figuring out the right amount of friction was a tightrope walk unto itself.

“We discovered trying to simulate a desktop is crazy and it’s not fun. We decided to reinvent all the mechanics and incorporate things that are modern, like the alt-tab … You have chats, a lot of missions, a lot of applications, a big database. [The game is about] how to organize and investigate more than complicated mechanics.”

Puig and Lazouras discovered in early playtests that players were flabbergasted when they realized how slow-going an era-appropriate OS would have been when frictionless alt-tabbing between a gazillion windows wasn’t always a given. To keep the focus on the story, they decided to hold back most of the jank—with a little leftover, as a treat.

“We did retain the dial-up modem, though,” said Lazouras. “So when you lose the internet, you do have to go in and re-dial up and reconnect … when you have five people giving you missions and contracts because you’re working for both the police and the cartel, and then these external characters start introducing themselves, then that desktop management becomes a key component.”

Old school cool aside, Vice Undercover is a game about living on the razor’s edge—something the team at Ancient Machine had no qualms with themselves working on their passion project. Lazouras said: “The policy that we set right from the start is no control from anybody else. We make this game, and it has to be like this.”

The team had a distributor lined up at one point, but working within the needs of that partnership “meant cutting [Vice Undercover] back way too much.” To make the game they wanted, the team had to take a chance. Lazouras said that only stoked his passion, looking back now on having written 500 character backstories for Vice Undercover’s labyrinthine plot. Coming from a background in AAA development, Lazouras was excited by the challenge of “having a really pared down solution to the core of a game” purely focused on the concept rather than the production values of “big, overblown games.”

“It’s a lot more fun working on something that’s just pure risk, especially when you put your own mortgage up on the line, because we’re self-funding it,” he said. Despite the complicated road behind, Lazouras is “super proud” of the game that’s slated to come out later this year.

“We really want you to feel like you’re an undercover cop buried under this storyline. I think we’ve achieved that. I think that’s the crowning glory of where we’re at with the game.”

Vice Undercover doesn’t have a release date locked in yet, but expect it on Steam sometime this summer.