Chris Hecker laughs as he recalls an early conversation he had with the founders of Supergiant, back when that studio was beginning production on an action-RPG called Bastion. Hecker was starting work on his game SpyParty at the time, and wasn't sure where to take it, if anywhere. "They've now lapped me three times!" he exclaims, noting they not only released Bastion, but followed it up with Transistor and Pyre while SpyParty remained in its prenatal state.

I first heard about SpyParty in 2009, on a podcast hosted by the editors of 1Up.com. Back then, it was seen as one of the foundational pieces of the indie renaissance—alongside Limbo, Braid, and Super Meat Boy—redefining the nature and economy of game development.

It's been nearly a decade since that moment. 1Up no longer exists, the indie scene has disemboweled and reincarnated itself dozens of times, Phil Fish finished Fez, announced Fez 2, and blew up his studio, and finally, finally, SpyParty is available on Steam. Yes, it is still in Early Access, and yes, 47-year-old Chris Hecker still clutches a list of planned improvements close to his chest.

"It's not relief yet, but there is a certain element of pride that I actually did it," he says. "I pushed the button."

If you're unaware, SpyParty is essentially a game of cat and mouse. One person plays a spy, in the cologne-splashed, Roger Moore sense of the word. They're assigned a number of missions they try to accomplish while blending in at a a glitzy cocktail party. Another player takes control of a sniper with a bird's eye view of the event. They win by putting a bullet through the spy's brain. 

That dynamic encourages a metagame where the person playing the spy wants to disguise themselves as a brainless NPC, laughing, dancing, drinking, all pantomimed within the confines of basic AI routines. The sniper, on the other hand, is looking for anyone at the party who looks too smart to be computer-controlled. It's a fascinating multiplayer conundrum that requires an understanding of psychology, rather than marksmanship, speed, or superior talent-tree builds.

Hecker is just as in love with the design today as he was 10 years ago. "For whatever reason I had infinite endurance to work on SpyParty," he tells me. "I want to keep working on it until it's perfect. I don't get bored with things. My job is different every five minutes. You're working on a 3D competitive online game with 30 animated characters. There's a lot of stuff to do. I can be a networking programmer, I can be a designer, I can be a marketer, I can do PR… I'm just lucky."

To be clear, SpyParty has been available in some form over the course of its protracted development. First as a closed-beta shipped out to hungry email accounts, then as a for-profit open-beta available from the website. Over the course of those nine years, Hecker has never been afraid of people beating him to the punch. Sure, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood took a crack at the concept with its tacked-on but surprisingly fun multiplayer mode (in which assassins attempt to stab each other on cobblestone Italian streets full of innocent bystanders dressed just like them). There was also The Ship, originally a Half-Life 2 mod, and Murderous Pursuits by the same team. However, Hecker was always secure in the knowledge that SpyParty was a difficult game to make—a delicately poached egg of an idea that takes a little bit of madness to get right. No major publisher would rip him off; they simply wouldn't want to take the risk. 

So how did Hecker manage to stay afloat for the past decade? How could he afford to take a Duke Nukem Forever amount of time to create his cloak-and-dagger masterpiece? Simple. The last project he worked on before SpyParty was Spore. His career at Microsoft started in the '90s, and ended after 2008 when Will Wright's ultra-hyped, ultimately flawed universe simulator hit store shelves. Once he left the company, Hecker tells me he had a couple hundred thousand dollars in his savings account, as well as a low-mortgage house in the Bay Area that he describes as the "perfect indie situation." It was more than enough to subsist on through SpyParty's development, though Hecker tells me at the tail end, he did borrow some money from his mother to push through the final thresholds.

"I spent my daughter's college fund and all my life's savings, the last couple years was kinda like 'Woah, what am I doing here,' like, 'All right I guess I'm burning all of this down,' there was a lot of anxiety which is distracting from actual development," he says. 

Hecker has absolutely no delusions about his privilege. He knows that most indie developers don't have swollen coffers from a senior position at a legacy company like Microsoft, nor do they have family members willing to throw money down the rabbit hole. SpyParty is currently paying him back, of course, but even if it didn't, Hecker would've been fine. "I can program a computer in the Bay Area, I'm not gonna starve to death," he laughs. "Like, 'Oh, I have to suffer and go make hundreds of thousands of dollars at Facebook.' I'm not mining coal at that point. There's a backup plan of just, 'Get a job,' but it's looking like I won't have to."

It's awesome that SpyParty is finally on Steam, and it's awesome that Hecker finally gets to reap the rewards of a decade's worth of hard work. SpyParty is his dream project. He's not sick of it in the slightest, nor does he yearn to escape into the next idea. It's an obsession that's paid off, and it makes you wish other creatives were afforded 10 solid years to perfect something they love.

"I had this idea for this thing, this concept, of a multiplayer game about subtle human behavior," says Hecker. "For whatever reason, someone upstairs wanted it to work incredibly well. My top players have 20,000 games played, and they're playing the game I made, it's not like at that high-level they're playing a different game, it's still this highly asymmetric game about subtle human behavior. It's awesome, it's great to see people do that, and they're so much better than me it's not even funny."   

Call it a reverse Turing test: rather than AI trying to appear indistinguishable from a human, it's a human trying to act like an AI. Trying to fool someone into thinking you're a computer-controlled character isn't a feature of very many games, and that's a damn shame—it can be anything from nail-bitingly tense to downright hilarious, and I love it so much I wish there were more games to do it in.

I'm not entirely sure why I find it so enthralling to pretend to be an NPC. Maybe I've spent so much time around NPCs in games that mimicking their behavior and movements becomes a creative exercise, or maybe it's the act of restraining myself from running at top speed, driving like a lunatic, or bunny-hopping all over the place like players usually do in games. Or maybe the roots go deeper than that.

SpyParty, in development for nearly a decade, arrived in Steam Early Access this past week. It's a 1v1 multiplayer game in which you and another player take turns playing two different roles. During a round, one player is a sniper observing a noisy cocktail party populated by NPCs, and the other is a spy mingling with those NPCs while trying to complete a series of tasks. The sniper wins if they correctly identify the other player and shoot the spy (or if the spy doesn't complete their tasks), and the spy wins if they complete their tasks before the clock runs out without being shot (or if the sniper shoots an innocent NPC). Then the players switch roles. 

Playing the sniper in SpyParty is fine, don't get me wrong. But when I'm sniper, all I'm really doing is waiting for my turn to be the spy so I can walk around acting like a computer.

Mr. Roboto

Playing as spy, blending in with AI characters for four minutes while the sniper's laser sight sweeps through the room is nerve-wracking. Did I wait long enough before moving to a new position? Did I wait too long? I just bumped into about four people and changed directions and missed my mark: did the sniper see all that? Do other characters bump into things? Do they stutter-step the way I just did? Should I stutter-step less, or not at all? My god, are my movements so artificial that it's glaringly obvious that I'm not artificial?

There's a lot of tension when the sniper's laser centers on your forehead while you're engaged in a fake conversation with bots. The only thing stronger than the urge to immediately move is the urge to remain perfectly still until the sniper looks elsewhere, and neither of those are wise since you need to act like you don't care that there's a rifle pointed at your head, since none of the other NPCs do.

There's even more intense excitement when you perform one of your tasks like seducing an NPC or contacting an operative while you're being closely watched. Or maybe you're not being watched—the sniper may train their sight in one spot while looking in another direction. You can't really tell when you're being examined, so you have to keep your NPC performance going at all times, and that means acting naturally—technically, acting unnaturally since you're supposed to be an NPC—even when a laser sight is between your eyes.

And there's more than just relief when the sniper's beam swings elsewhere after a long moment of scrutiny. Winning a round as a spy feels amazing: not only is it fun roaming around a fake party filled with fake people, pretending to be fake (I honestly sometimes wish there was no sniper and no clock, so I could just spend an hour mingling with NPCs) but it's a weird and wonderful joy knowing another human being was looking directly at you, maybe a dozen times in the past few minutes, but didn't see you for what you were. You were  hiding from a hunter, but hiding in plain sight, a needle in a stack of needles.

The pleasure of acting like an NPC in SpyParty is immense because the other player knows you're there, somewhere. They're deliberately looking for you. But there's another game in which you can pretend to be an NPC and your opponent isn't looking for you: they don't even know they're in a multiplayer game.

Dog watching

I don't play a lot of online games, but when Watch Dogs arrived in 2014 I fell into a headlong obsession with its multiplayer mode Hacking Invasion (a similar mode is in Watch Dogs 2). The objective is to enter another player's game and hack their data (basically, push a button and wait for a timer to run out while avoiding being killed by them) but what's most interesting about it is that when you arrive in this stranger's game, they aren't notified of it. Until you actually begin hacking them, they still think they're playing a singleplayer game. Which means you get to act like an NPC while no one is even targeting you.

When you invade, you first need to get close enough to the other player to hack them. This can sometimes be a challenge if the other player is driving at top speed when you arrive, so you need to catch up to them by also driving like a maniac, then slow down and try to resemble an NPC when the player is close enough to see you. It feels like being Dean Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, racing down the hall but stopping to walk normally when passing classrooms. 

Nothing is happening here, students. Everything is normal. 

Once the other player is within range, you can start hacking them, but I usually waited because a big part of the fun was the act of observing someone playing without them knowing you're there. In addition to being able to casually walk around or slowly drive like an NPC, there's also a bit of voyeurism, I suppose. It's not like watching someone stream a game on Twitch for an audience, but viewing someone completely oblivious to your presence. You weren't invited and in a lot of ways, it feels like you shouldn't be there at all. There's even something a bit off-putting about it: it feels like a tiny invasion of privacy. (You could, if you wanted, opt-out of invasions.) 

Once close to my mark, I liked to approach as carefully as I could, strolling along, just observing. The hacking part of the game was fun, too, as they were notified you were in their game and tried to hunt you down, so a bit like SpyParty at that point. They know someone nearby is a real person—or a fake fake-person—and you couldn't really be hidden in the open for long as close scrutiny would give you away.

But the moments before the hacking, when you can just wander around in someone's game, stroll past them, drive behind them, blend in with the rest of the NPCs, I could happily do that all day.

Hide and peek

The enjoyment of pretending you're an AI may stem from a much more basic concept than mimicking an NPC, something as simple as the act of hiding. Hide and Seek, aka PropHunt, is a mode for Garry's Mod where one team disguises themselves as objects on a map and the other team hunts for them. You're not pretending to be an NPC but a soda can, a plant, a lamp, or a sofa. Hide and Seek, in other words, its hide-and-seek like you played as a kid, but instead of hiding behind a couch, you are the couch.

It's silly, certainly, and there's no real challenge or art to acting like a cardboard box or a traffic cone, except perhaps in where you choose to place yourself. But there is that same sort of thrill you find in SpyParty and Watch Dogs, as a hunter runs close, smashing or shooting objects nearby, and you just wait, wondering if they'll hit you next. They look in your direction and stop in front of you, and you're gripped with that same tension. Have they made me? Will they shoot me? Am I acting enough like a box, or suspiciously too much like a box?

And when they run past, you experience the same feeling, not just of relief but also the joy of having having fooled them. They looked at me, right at me, but they didn't see a human player. To them, I was just another part of the game.

Spies come in many forms, so the best spy games on PC could be tense games about intrigue and infiltration, or high octane adventures starring a special agent. It would be good to see more games focusing on spycraft, espionage, and subterfuge, but we can make do with putting on some cool glowing goggles to infiltrate a base. Here are some of our favourite games starring awesome spies.

Alpha Protocol

A gloriously janky RPG from Obsidian that casts you as crack spy Michael Thorton. This was a brave attempt to combine Mass Effect style conversation and branching plot systems with a cover-based shooter. The combat side of things is a mess, so it’s worth looking up the different weapon classes so you know which disciplines to avoid (I found pistols worked well enough). It’s worth playing through the dodgy action to roleplay your favourite flavour of spy—pick your JB: Jason Bourne, James Bond, or Jack Bauer. 

The best thing about Alpha Protocol is the branching plot. The alliances you choose will change the order you visit each continental hub, and can have a huge impact on the characters you meet and the endings you unlock.—Tom Senior

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

This classic stealth sandbox came out 13 years ago, but still perfectly captures the thrill of being an action movie covert agent. It’s like Hitman, but you have cooler gadgets and the ability to suspend yourself above guards by doing the splits. 

This is Sam Fisher’s finest hour thanks to Michael Ironside’s performance and a darkly humourous script. Chaos Theory features some exceptional level design, and a decent co-op campaign that encourages you to co-ordinate sweet simultaneous takedowns from the shadows. —Tom Senior 

No One Lives Forever

One of the few spy games to draw influence from the cheesy Man From Uncle meets Austin Powers 1960s idea of a spy adventure. As the glamorous Cate Archer you fight through jump out of planes, race bikes, scuba to sunken ships and other antics you might expect from Roger Moore era Bond. Every mission is different, and the whole adventure is played for laughs. It’s a difficult game to get hold of, and tough to get fully working on current machines, but it goes down as a great spy game in the PC gaming canon.—Tom Senior 

SpyParty

Paranoia is an important part of being a spy. Your cover could be blown at any moment, and the consequences are drastic. In fact someone could be watching you through a high-powered scope right now. SpyParty captures this feeling in a series of small scenes—a party in a pub, a penthouse party, a boat party (spies love to party). One player plays a sniper, assessing the scene for any signs of spy-like behaviour. The other player is the spy. As the spy you have to blend in with NPCs as naturally as you can while you saunter around completing secret objectives.

As the spy you can see the sniper’s targeting laser moving through the room. It’s terrifying to see it flick from one side of the room to your forehead after you make a sloppy move. On the plus side you can see when the sniper is obsessed with innocent NPCs and use them as cover to plant that bug you need to win.—Tom Senior 

Invisible, Inc

Infiltrate high-security environments as a group of specialists in this hybrid of stealth game, turn-based strategy and roguelike. Get in, run the job, then get out again, and use your agents' different abilities to make it happen. This is a meticulous spy game where every wrong move can cost you dearly (you can rewind a turn if you've messed up that badly), but every well-executed strategy will make you feel like a badass. 

The best thing about Invisible Inc is that you can customise the parameters of a campaign to your preferences—adjust the amount of credits you get, how long each campaign goes on for and how many guards you can expect to find in each mission. Even though it gets real tricky, the difficulty is very much in your control. On additional playthroughs, you'll unlock new agents who provide you with a different power base.—Samuel Roberts

Covert Action

Sid Meier’s spy game was remarkably ambitious for 1990. You investigate randomly generated missions by infiltrating facilities, planting bugs, stealing files, tailing suspects and decrpting codes. Each of these activities has its own minigame. To decrypt a code you have to decode a scrambled message under time pressure. To infiltrate a building you pick a loadout, slip into the premises and start photographing documents with a microcamera.

It looks ropey by today’s standards, but Covert Action has remarkable breadth of scope that few games attempt today. There’s a reason for that, perhaps. Sid Meier was unhappy with the disparate nature of the Covert Action’s minigames, and felt as though the activities detracted from the overall mission, which involved tracking down spies in a network to find the mastermind.—Tom Senior 

KGB

Set in Russia during the last days of the Soviet Union, this brutally difficult point-and-click adventure sees you investigating corruption within the KGB—at least to begin with. Over the course of the game, protagonist Maksim, a KGB captain, finds himself swept up in a conspiracy involving the murder of a former agent.

It’s from 1992 so it’s hardly the most slick or accessible of adventures, but its depiction of Cold War espionage is brilliantly done and uncompromisingly realistic in places. There are numerous ways to suddenly die, including being executed for speaking out of turn to your superiors. KGB was also released on CD-ROM under the name Conspiracy, featuring FMV cutscenes that starred Donald Sutherland as Maksim’s late father.—Andy Kelly

Gunpoint

Steal secrets in (former PC Gamer staffer) Tom Francis's stealthy puzzle/platformer, where you play a spy who can hack and control different parts of a building's security system. What I remember liking about Gunpoint more than anything is its length—you'll clear it in about three or four hours, but in that time you'll go from being shot dead a bunch of times by guards to perfecting its systems and skilfully bounding in and out of buildings. It's perfectly paced, with no unnecessary levels or dull bits. 

If you like immersive sims, this reframes most of their core elements into a 2D game. Plus you can smash your little spy guy through windows, which feels really good.—Samuel Roberts

Metal Gear Solid

“Tactical Espionage Action” is Metal Gear Solid’s tagline. In some ways the first game captures the spy fantasy better than the rest of the series, because in MGS Snake is an underdog rather than a legendary battlefield soldier. Snake’s hushed conversations with his handlers over intercom create a sense that you’re camped behind enemy lines, and it’s a dedicated stealth game. The worst thing you can do is get spotted by a guard. That brash alert noise is burned into my brain.

It’s a good introduction to Kojima’s brainverse. Expect bizarre bosses and a tendency to reach through the fourth wall. The spy fantasy starts to falter when you get into the extraordinary melodrama of the finale, but overall it’s a clever spy game that stands up today. Now we just need the brilliant Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater to make the leap to PC.—Tom Senior 

Neon Struct

A cyberpunk spy thriller that pays homage to Deus Ex, Neon struct is a slick heist game that challenges you to complete missions non-lethally. You have a bunch of sci-fi gadgets that can scramble gadgets and turn lights off at range, but its best move is a totally silent slide move that can get you out of trouble. 

You explore city hubs between missions. That’s where you buy gadgets and stims that make you invisible in short bursts. It’s a neat little spy game with a stylish low-fi look, though Andy found the sparse sound design offputting in our review.—Tom Senior 

SpyParty, "a competitive espionage game about subtle human behavior," has been around for a very long time: Development began in 2009, and we listed it as among the vanguard of "The Future of Indie" in 2011. It's come along slowly but surely since then through some major updates and a beta, and on April 12 it will finally make its way to Steam. 

SpyParty sounds a bit like an extremely slow, pared-down take on a common Team Fortress 2 scenario: One player, the Spy, must complete missions while mingling amongst AI-controlled party guests, while the other, the Sniper, has to figure out which of the guests is the Spy, and then put a bullet in them. The Spy wins when all missions are successfully completed, or if the Sniper kills the wrong person; the Sniper claims victory if they kill the Spy, or if the time limit runs out before the Spy's job is finished. 

We spoke with SpyParty creator Chris Hecker about the game in 2015, and while the game has obviously come a long way since then, it's still an interesting and relevant look at the underlying design: Why it's important to keep any particular character from becoming a favorite, for instance, and the effort to keep the game "timeless."  

"We want there to be aspects of different eras living in the same space simultaneously, so one person uses a pocket watch while another person uses a mobile phone," Hecker said at the time. "But I never want it to feel like the game is in a specific time or place."

A tutorial and "beginner mode" were recently added to SpyParty to ease players into its many complexities, and six new maps were rolled out today, bringing the total to 10. Early Access pricing hasn't been announced, but the beta version is still available for $15 at spyparty.com, and Hecker confirmed that anyone who purchases that beta will also get the Steam version.