Game 167: The Clue! (1994) - Introduction

Written by MenhirMike

Today’s game is 1994’s The Clue!, a heist game with adventure game elements - and perfectly timed for the weekend where we’re trying to steal someone’s heart all over again! Or wear a hockey mask and wonder if the NES game counts as an adventure?

We are playing as Matt Stuvysunt and tasked with planning and executing more and more daring heists. To do that, we decide on up to three accomplices (that all want part of the loot), a getaway vehicle, the getaway driver, and the actions of each of the characters during the heist. Outside of the heists, we need to acquire accomplices and tools, fence our stolen goods, and advance Matt’s personal story that will hopefully not come to an early end in an English jail, or worse.

The game idea is clearly taken from 1986’s They Stole a Million. Some sources erroneously call The Clue! a remake, but it has no plot or character details in common and none of the original developers were involved in any way - it’s a completely different game that just took the concept of planning and executing heists.

Is that already a bonus point, making a burglary game by burgling an existing game concept?

The game is credited to developers “...and avoid panic by” and published by neo Software from Austria. It was originally released in German as Der Clou! and localized as The Clue! in English at the same time, a localization that doesn’t seem to make much sense but at least sounds pretty much the same. In both cases, the exclamation mark is part of the name that I am going to omit from now on. Reviews at the time were positive, with ratings in the high 70s to low 90s.

The Clue was initially dismissed during the 1994 Year Ahead post, but since Will put up the CAPs to review it I’m going to do exactly that. As a disclaimer, I did play the game several times before and finished it back in the 90s, but haven’t touched it in years and never played it in English.

The English box is the same except for the title.

The game had versions on Amiga (32-Color/1 MB OCS and 256-Color AGA), Amiga CD32, MS-DOS Floppy, and MS-DOS CD.

The CD-ROM versions add speech for the main character, but no CD music. The CD32 version has an unfortunate save game implementation where all saves are made to RAM and lost when the console is restarted - so they tacked on a password system. It’s only 6 numbers long, and given the tiny NVRAM in the console, this isn’t too bad. The main issue is that burglary plans are not saved - I’ll get back to that in the first gameplay post.

There is a pretty significant difference between the Amiga and MS-DOS versions in terms of presentation. The soundtrack is different, and the graphics during burglaries are different. The MS-DOS version uses a top-down perspective, whereas the Amiga version uses an isometric perspective, and different graphics during the planning and actual burglary stages. Furthermore, the Amiga runs in hi-res 640x256 instead of 320x200 and makes use of the extra vertical space.

I am going to play the English Amiga AGA version without speech. That’s because the Amiga is the original version, and I like the different graphics and better use of vertical space. The MS-DOS version is a perfectly fine version of the game as well though. I will not play the CD32 version due to the save/password system, but I will play from a hard disk install because the game requires excessive disk swapping.

The Amiga version has an isometric planning interface, whereas MS-DOS is top down. The Amiga has more vertical space to use for character information, and different graphics for the planning and burglary stages.

The manual gives us the backstory: We are playing as Matt Stuvysunt, the son of famous burglar and convict Dean Stuvysunt. Dean has a friend named Herbert Briggs in London, and thus Matt sets out to achieve his dream: To steal the crown jewels.

But it's literally called the right side.

The games’ intro starts on January 29th 1994 with a funeral - our funeral. Matt died due to a car accident while driving someone else's car without a license. There is a man named Herb here, a woman named Sabien, an inspector, another unnamed man, and the priest. Afterwards, we’re jumping back 41 years to February 3rd 1953 when Matt just arrived in London’s Victoria Station. Everyone just longed to forget World War II and wants to live vicariously here and now.

This is where the game starts, and where I’ll pick up in the first gameplay post next time.

The station opened in 1860, during the reign of Queen Victoria.

neo was founded in 1993 by Hannes Seifert, Niki Laber and Peter Baustädter. Amiga users would probably recognize them for their debut game Whale’s Voyage. They were also active as a publisher for other developers; we should see them here in the future with 1996’s Mutation of J.B. and 1998’s Rent-a-Hero. As with so many smaller video game studios of the time, neo’s story would not have a happy ending. They were purchased in 2001 by Take Two, renamed Rockstar Vienna in 2003, and unceremoniously closed in 2006.

The Clue is credited to Karam Nada (writing), Helmut Habershek, Kaweh Kazemi (programming), Markus Hudolin (graphics), with Hannes Seifert composing the music, Clemens Helbock converting the music to the Amiga, and David Rowe creating cover artwork. Karam Nada and Kaweh Kazemi would continue to work for neo/Rockstar Vienna on projects like the sequel The Sting, the first two Max Payne games, and a few others. The four of them would reunite in 2015 as The Game Species for a sole adventure game, Undercover Missions: Kursk K-141.

Hannes Seifert would remain a prolific character in the industry, moving on to Deep Silver, Io-Interactive, Riot Games, and joined Crytek as Co-CEO in early 2026. Niki Laber is currently working on Battue, “A blockchain-based AAA game created by the masterminds behind Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, and Hitman.” for which I’m not holding my breath. Peter Baustäder’s last credit is on 2004’s Golden Eye: Rogue Agent, I’m not sure if he’s still involved in video games.

The Clue had an official add-on released in 1995, titled Profidiskette (“Expert Disk”). It added eight additional heists, new getaway vehicles, and new accomplices, but didn’t change or expand the story. The source code of the game was officially released in the year 2000, which led to an SDL port (“COSP”) to modern systems. I have no experience with any of the open source projects, and whether there was an official release of the Profidisk in English (I could not find one for either the Amiga or MS-DOS - even the open source archive “TheClouProfiDOS” only contains the regular version of the game).

A sequel was released in 2001, named The Sting! in English (after the 1973 Paul Newman movie but otherwise unrelated to it) and Der Clou! 2 in German (because we are serious people that don’t have humour). The sequel was not nearly as acclaimed and is mostly forgotten these days - I played it on launch day and remember enjoying it, but never finished it.

I really don’t know how well this game will do with our rating system that is tailored to what we’d normally consider adventure games, but get your guesses in and we’ll see in the end how it all shakes out. 

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it's an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won't be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 50 CAPs in return. It's also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.