Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy takes the bright, primary-colored world of Warren Beatty's 1990 movie and flings you directly into an unending crossfire with mobsters popping out of every window.

Titus France takes on the comic book detective

When Disney brought comic strip detective Dick Tracy back to the big screen in 1990, the video game rights ended up oddly split. Disney published an action-adventure game for computers through its own interactive branch, but French studio Titus France SA secured a license to build a pure arcade shooter for home platforms. Instead of open-ended investigation, Titus stripped the premise down to side-scrolling violence across five levels.

The goal is straightforward: fight your way through the streets, survive the mob's hit squads, and put five high-profile crime bosses behind bars, ending with Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice. Programmer Didier Devulder translated the distinct look of the film into sharp EGA and VGA graphics, painting the city in bright yellows and oranges that stood out against the muddy brown palettes typical of PC games in 1990.

How Dick Tracy plays on MS-DOS

Your arsenal in Dick Tracy ranges from your bare fists to a standard sidearm and a heavy-duty Tommy gun. As you move screen by screen through the city, hitmen lean out of upper-floor windows, step out from alleys, and drop down from platforms, firing high-velocity bullets the second they appear. Because DOS hardware at the time struggled with smooth horizontal motion, the game shifts between static screens rather than fluid scrolling, meaning every single room transition presents a new firing squad.

Movement feels heavy, and the key bindings present their own challenge. Defaulting to standard keyboard control, jumping requires pressing Enter, while switching between your hand pistol and machine gun is tied to pressing Down and Enter together. With gangsters constantly respawning on both sides of the screen, taking a second to fumble for a weapon switch usually costs half your health bar.

• Fists for close-quarters emergencies when ammo runs dry
• Handgun for precision shots against sniper windows
• Tommy gun for clearing crowded sidewalks before moving to the next frame

Unforgiving enemies and broken ports

Contemporary reviewers in magazines like Germany's GameStar were quick to point out the brutal design flaws. Enemies do not just pop up in set positions; they spawn infinitely behind and in front of you. There are no temporary invincibility frames after getting hit, which means standing in the wrong spot for two seconds allows three overlapping bullets to drain your entire life meter. German gaming press famously mocked the balance, while Joystick magazine in France ended up printing cheat codes and memory trainers just so readers could see the later stages.

While the PC release had its problems, porting catastrophes elsewhere made the MS-DOS version look polished by comparison. Titus rushed a Commodore 64 version to shelves that became infamous in UK gaming press. Commodore Format magazine awarded it an 11% score - the lowest mark in the publication's history - citing missing character frames, broken collision detection, and incomplete level layouts. On PC, Christophe Fevre's AdLib soundtrack at least gave the shootouts a moody, energetic backdrop.

Why the challenge holds up today

If you enjoy unforgiving retro action games that test your reflexes and patience, this title is a curious piece of licensed software history. The game does not offer passwords or mid-level save points, making a full run a matter of memorizing spawn triggers and executing precise jumps. European developers back then approached movie adaptations like brutal arcade coin-ops designed to eat quarters, even when sold on floppy disks for home setups.

You can play Dick Tracy online right now, free in your browser, with no setup required. The jump controls and infinite enemy spawns are just as punishing today as they were in 1990, but taking down Big Boy Caprice without typing in a magazine cheat code is still a real achievement for classic PC gamers.