The Great Giana Sisters

The Great Giana Sisters
German cover art for the Commodore 64
Developer(s)	Time Warp[1]
Publisher(s)	Rainbow Arts[1]
Designer(s)	Armin Gessert Manfred Trenz
Composer(s)	Chris Huelsbeck
Platform(s)	Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MSX
Release	May 6, 1987
Genre(s)	Platformer
Mode(s)	Single-player, multiplayer

The Great Giana Sisters is a platform game developed by the West German company Time Warp and published by Rainbow Arts in 1987 for home computers such as the Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST. Players control Giana (or her sister Maria in the multiplayer mode) to explore a magical world inside their dreams; to wake up, they must find a giant diamond. They traverse side-scrolling stages while avoiding hazards such as monsters and other enemies. These can be defeated by using power-ups, which grant the player abilities such as firing projectiles and making enemies fall asleep.

The game was designed by Armin Gessert and Manfred Trenz. They were tasked with developing the game after Marc Ulrich of Rainbow Arts had seen the popular Nintendo video game Super Mario Bros. (1985). Gessert and Trenz were told to create a game obviously recognizable as being like Super Mario Bros. but still legally distinct. Following its release in West Germany, the game was released in the United Kingdom to praise from publications such as Zzap!64 and Computer and Video Games, who liked the game's gameplay and many secrets, despite taking significant inspiration from Mario.

Following its UK release, the game was almost immediately pulled from shops after Rainbow Arts received a notice from Nintendo. Despite being commercially unavailable, the game grew to become one of the most popular home computer games of its era via pirated and emulated versions of the game. A sequel was made for Commodore 64 titled Hard'n'Heavy which downplayed its Nintendo inspiration while various new Giana Sisters games were released in the early 2000s. The game's music, by Chris Huelsbeck, grew popular among video game music fans and has been used in later games and performed by symphony orchestras decades after the game's release.

The Great Giana Sisters is set in the dream of a girl, Giana. She dreams about a world of deserted castles filled with monsters and can only wake up when she finds a large diamond.^[2] The game is a platform game, where the player controls either Giana in single player mode, or, in two-player mode, switches between Giana and Maria.^[2][3][4] The player controls either sister via a joystick, where they can walk and jump through 33 levels of horizontally scrolling platforms, while avoiding holes and other dangerous objects such as nails and fire. Each player starts with five lives. Each level has a 100-second time limit. If time runs out, the player loses a life.^[5][6]

Power-ups granting enhancements can be collected. These include projectiles, lightning and strawberry power ups, a clock which cause all enemies on screen to fall asleep, magic bombs that vanish all enemies on screen, and lollies which give the player an extra life.^[7]

In the 1970s and early 1980s, video game clones of popular arcades were rampant, and this growth of clones were followed on home computers. These clones often copied the gameplay and had similar names to their original influences, with titles like Munch Man (1982) or Snapper (1982) which were derivative of Namco's Pac-Man (1980).^[1] The trend continued for The Great Giana Sisters. Trenz and Gessert were assigned to make a game similar to Nintendo's popular Super Mario Bros. (1985) after Marc Ulrich, the CEO of publisher Rainbow Arts, saw the game.^[1] Trenz recalled that Ulrich grew excited by the potential to be the first to offer a similar game for home computers.^[8] In 1983, the Commodore 64 home computer had been introduced in West Germany and quickly became the popular home computer in the country.^[9] Trenz initially got into computers through a VIC-20 in 1984 and was so impressed with it that he purchased a Commodore 64 and began developing his own games in BASIC and assembly language. After coming third in a contest 1986 contest for a German magazine called 64'er, the small company Rainbow Arts was impressed with his entry and asked him to work on graphics for their games. He joined the company on a permanent basis in 1987, and The Great Giana Sisters was his first in-house project.^[10]

As well as Trenz, who created the game's visuals and high score programming, the developers included Gessert, who developed the rest of the code, and Chris Huelsbeck who wrote the score. Trenz was not a big fan of the original Nintendo game, having seeing the PlayChoice arcade version and Donkey Kong (1981) before, but was more interested in games like Defender (1981). Trenz and Gessert received a Nintendo Entertainment System and a copy of Super Mario Bros. and played it intensively to discover the game's secrets. Trenz expressed difficulty with creating the game, stating that it had to be immediately recognizable to players as Super Mario Bros., but legally distinct as to not cause any legal issues for Rainbow Arts with Nintendo.^[11]

To do so, Trenz changed the mushroom and turtle-like enemies of the original game to giant ants and other cute monsters. He recollected that "it would be incredibly cheeky to simply copy the enemies as they were in Super Mario Bros., so I decided to invent as many new and funny ones as possible".^[12] He opted to create a style that borrowed the visual sense but had its own design, simpler and shorter than Super Mario Bros., allowing them to make many different levels within their short development time.^[11][13]

Trenz found the Giana sisters' character design difficult, thinking each draft had "something missing".^[11] In contrast to Mario, who grows in size when getting a mushroom, the Giani sisters grew spiky hair when collecting a power-up. Trenz's decision was technical, as he thought creating a larger sprite would have been too close to Super Mario Bros.^[12] Musically, the game differs from Super Mario Bros. It features unique music for the title screen music, and two for the main game: one for overworld stages and one for boss stages.^[14]

The Great Giana Sisters was released on May 6, 1987, in Europe.^[14] The Great Giana Sisters was released for the home computers including the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga and MSX. A version was announced for the ZX Spectrum but went unreleased.^[1][15]

Following the British release of the game, Rainbow Arts received what Huelsbeck described as a "nasty letter" from Nintendo, without formal legal action, but including a warning to take the game off the market.^[16] The British distributor for the game withdrew the game from sale in 1988.^[17] Publications such as Your Sinclair suggested in 1988 that Nintendo had taken legal action against the distributor, although Trenz later claimed that he was not sure who or what caused the game to responsible for the game being pulled from shelves. He noted that "placing the slogan 'The Brothers are History!' on the box certainly couldn't have helped".^[13] Darran Jones wrote in Retro Gamer that the game only grew in popularity after being pulled from store shelves, while Trenz said that the game only received a wider audience after it became commercially unavailable.^[13]

Trenz was happy with the German box art for the game but disliked the UK version, stating it made the characters look strange, and that the Giana sisters resembled Miss Piggy from The Muppets.^[12] The games were generally the same across the Atari ST and Amiga as they were for the Commodore 64, with the Atari ST version lacking a scrolling screen.^[18] Darran Jones in Retro Gamer echoed this, lambasting that the Amstrad CPC port of the game had a title screen resembling the UK cover, which he described as "gruesome art".^[13]

Darran Jones of Retro Gamer wrote in his overview of the game that it received a "fair amount of critical acclaim" on its release for the Commodore 64.^[12] Reviews compared it to contemporary platformer games. "GBH" of Your Commodore compared the game to earlier attempts at platforming games on home computers, writing that players no longer need "to make pixel perfect leaps or time every move down to the last split second".^[3] "Dunc" of Your Sinclair found the game similar to Wonder Boy declaring it superior to that game due to its addictive gameplay.^[27] A Zzap!64 reviewer went as far as to say it was "the best game of its kind since Bubble Bobble, and there can't be many higher recommendation than that".^[25] Reviews from several publications including ACE, Power Play, Zzap!64 and Computer and Video Games all compared the game to Super Mario Bros. (1985).^{[19][23][25][18]} Matt Bielby of Computer and Video Games went as far as to call it "as straight a rip-off as they come"^[18] Reviewers of Zzap!64 and Power Play generally found it not as strong as Nintendo's game.^[18][25][23]

Other reviews commented on the overall appeal and the music. "GBH" and the Zzap!64 reviewers found the game addictive, highlighting the amount of secrets and power-ups.^[19][3] Rod Lawton of Ace questioned whether players would feel compelled to complete the game.^[19] Reviews of the game's music included Lawton calling it "appropriately jaunty",^[19] while the reviewers of Zzap!64 found it a little twee, but ultimately "excellent".^[25]

The games were generally the same across the Atari ST and Amiga as they were for the Commodore 64, with the Atari ST version lacking a scrolling screen.^[18] Jones of Retro Gamer described the version for the Amstrad CPC as a "god-awful conversion" with low-quality graphics and no sound.^[13] Crash reviewed the unreleased ZX Spectrum release, praising the variety of the game. It echoed comparisons to Super Mario Bros. stating that The Great Giana Sisters could not compare in terms of graphics to Nintendo's game, but that "in terms of gameplay (which is the most important thing after all), those Super Mario Bros have certainly met their match".^[22] The reviewers generally praised the game, while finding it also lacking colour and that it ran slower than the Commodore 64 original.^[22] Tony Dillion of Sinclair User wrote positively about the game's theme and graphics, but that the game performed far too slowly to be playable.^[26]

From retrospective reviews, Kristan Reed of Eurogamer stated that the game felt like a footnote in gaming history by 2007 and that it was one of the best games ever made for the Commodore 64, saying "to most teenage C64 owners of the late '80s, it was an essential release at the point when the best developers had already started to migrate to the 16-bit systems".^[21] In a 2021 overview, Stefano Castelli of IGN called it the best scrolling platform games on the Commodore 64, while still being a pale imitation to Super Mario Bros.. He wrote that The Great Giana Sisters was lacking inspired level design in terms of variety, the control lacked the subtleties of Nintendo's game, and that Huelsback music was less inspired than Koji Kondo's Super Mario Bros. score.^[28]

The Great Giana Sisters received a sequel in 1989 with Hard'n'Heavy for the Commodore 64, Atari ST and Amiga.^[12] The characters in the game wore space suits and had an outer-space themed game, a theme less obviously connected to Super Mario Bros.^[12] By 2008, the rights to the Great Giana Sisters were held by Gessert's Spellbound Entertainment.^[13] Further follow-ups to the game followed in the 21st century, such as Giana Sisters DS (2009), Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams (2012), and Giana Sisters: Dream Runners (2015).^{[14][29][30][31]}

Andreas Lange and Michael Liebe wrote in Video Games Around the World (2015) that along with Trenz's other Rainbow Arts game Turrican (1989), The Great Giana Sisters was the most popular action game from Germany, with both titles receiving international acclaim.^[32] Despite being removed from the market, the game grew in popularity via piracy and emulation.^[21] Gessert later reflected that "I think it's a great game, but it never reached the detail and class of Super Mario Bros".^[13]

Huelsbeck would go on to compose music for games in Star Wars: Rogue Squadron and R-Type series.^[32][33] His music has been adapted to symphony orchestra music, such as at the concert titled Symphonic Shades in tribute to Huelsbeck's career.^[33] Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams also features Huelsbeck's music which is extended and features new arrangements from the original game's music.^[14]

• The Great Giana Sisters at MobyGames