The Collection Chamber: C.I.T.Y. 2000 LONDON

Be Daring in London!

All the mystery of London awaits you in this thrilling game of espionage! Using your CD-ROM drive, you'll enter the real world of London as the American agent Jon Daring. Your mission: infiltrate and prevent the evil drug lord, S. Rooter, from taking control of England's capital city. But beware, for those who've gone before you have never returned!

This spy epic is set in the real streets of London. You'll actually learn your way around the town as you visit sites such as the houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, the Tower of London and hundreds more! Clues to S. Rooter's nefarious plot are scattered throughout the city and you'll need to travel around the town like a native in order to foil his diabolical plan!
Detailed maps, digitized sound and real-time animation give you the complete feeling of being in London (minus the jet lag).
See all the sites in one of Europe's greatest cities!

~ from the back of the box

The thought of exploring a real-life city in a video game is an appealing one, and doing so in my own capital city of London even more so. Many have given it a go, but they're often unbelievably romanticised or fantasised to a point where it's not the same city I know and love. Give me that loud, grubby and sprawling streets that have something to see or do in every direction. That's exactly what Canadian developers Rollogame Ltd attempted to do in the early days of the CD-ROM. Released in 1993, C.I.T.Y. 2000 gave us a virtual sight-seeing tour by way of an FMV point-and-click spy thriller.

What stands out about the game today is nor really the story or puzzle design, but the atmosphere. The game presents London through hundreds of still photographs stitched together into navigable pathways, preserving the city exactly as it looked in the early 90's. There's an almost documentary quality to wandering around these digitised streets filled with vintage clothing, dated signage and landmarks that feel untouched by modern redevelopment. As a historical time capsule, it's fascinating. As a game world, it's a nightmare. Navigation is painfully awkward, with streets connecting in ways that make no geographical sense whatsoever. One route might let you walk straight through what looks like a brick wall while another refuses access to an obviously open road. The map helps. Not only can it operate as a pseudo GPS in the top right of the image, but when you find the city map you can enlarge it to navigate the streets from there. This will cut out the annoyingly slow transitions between screens, but also deny you the pleasure of seeing them in the first place. As the scenery is what I feel is the game's greatest asset, this is not ideal.

To interact with the environment, make sure you have the Objects window open (left).

Decrypting the letter is easy - shift one letter along - but writing it down before the video ends is hard (right).

The other game mechanics are also a little under-developed and confusing. Movement is handled directly through the main display, which initially suggests the kind of straightforward point-and-click adventure we're all familiar with, but the row of verbs at the bottom of the screen is programmed in a very odd way. The icons themselves make sense - look, talk, use and so on - but you don't use them to interact with the environment itself. Instead, they function almost entirely through the inventory system. Your own inventory remains permanently visible in the lower-right corner while anything interactive nearby appears separately inside its own menu labelled "Objects" (the brown sack icon). If there's anything there, click on the verb icon, then click on the object or inventory icon.

This leads to an almost surreal disconnect between what you see in the photograph and what you can actually interact with. An important object might appear nowhere obvious in the main image yet magically exist inside the "Objects" menu instead. Other times, actions happen automatically. For example, I spent ages at the beginning looking for the Information Booth at the airport only for the video clip to pop up at the top of an escalator. It's very much a product of its time; that early multimedia era when developers suddenly had CD-ROM storage to play with but hadn't yet worked out how human beings naturally process visual space. There's a certain amateur charm to it all, but if you want to get anywhere before tedium sets in, have a walkthrough to hand.

Sorry guv, no access (left).

Come on through! Just squeeze past Marylin Monroe and that other guy and walk through the wall (right).

The plot beats themselves are usually straight forward and direct. Cut scenes and letters usually tells you exactly where you need to go next but the problem is actually getting there. The map is useful for an overall area where red-lines detail what reads are actually part of the game, and little dots represent each node. When you get there, it's a little more obtuse. One otherwise memorable scavenger hunt sends you to Madame Tussauds to meet a contact who, without rhyme or reason let alone forewarning, turns out to be a waxwork of Henry VIII. The game offers almost no guidance on how to identify him or what you're expected to say once you do. It makes you feel less like a secret agent, and more like a haggard tourist having nervous breakdown.

While the nearly full-frame photos are detailed having been scanned immediately after being collected from Supasnaps, the FMV is a little more grainy appearing in a small window when triggered. You can't expect award-worthy acting, but what is here is delivered with the exact intensity of an instructional workplace safety tape. Jon Daring, the game's hero introduced to us as he's slovenly watching TV in his dressing gown, approaches every minor action with conviction though not nearly enough humour. Played by Steve Usher-Wilson, he somehow stops the whole production collapsing into parody even if it would be more memorable if it were.

Puzzles works well in concept than in practice. They all stay grounded to the spy-thriller premise throwing coded messages and decryption gadgets at the player. Even the more traditional crossword puzzle fits naturally into the world. Problems arise when you need to actually study an item. Looking at it will trigger a pre-rendered video clip, so if there's a multi-sentence encrypted message on that letter you're looking at, you have about 5 seconds to write it down. It's another example of the game never really thinking about how the game will play. A photographic trip through London is great in concept, but every screen looks like a page from some rando's holiday photo album rather than an inter-connected journey.

You can walk the streets of London on the Map screen. It's much quicker (left).

But you miss ancient documents of city life like this if you do so. Some of those outfits sure are a choice (right).

Rollogame reportedly planned a sequel titled C.I.T.Y. 2000 Paris. They seemed to confident of its success that they proudly claimed its future arrival on the back of the box. Unfortunately, the project never materialised beyond the planning stages. This was not a sales issue, but a logistical one. French law required written permission for every person caught on film which would be unfeasibly complicated, expensive and time consuming when documenting the streets of Paris. So, despite some rumours to the contrary, the sequel never came to fruition.

Viewed today, C.I.T.Y. 2000 feels like an archaic remnant of both early 90's PC-gaming and London itself. In 1993, for someone armed with a shiny new CD-ROM drive and no easy access to London, this probably seemed like a great find. Thirty years later, especially if you live close enough to simply catch a train into the capital yourself, the tourism aspect has lost some impact even if some of it has been replaced by history and nostalgia. The terrible navigation remains a constant irritation and nearly every mechanic feels half-formed. Yet there's still undeniable value here, if only as an accidental time capsule. Beneath the clumsy design and baffling interface lies a strangely hypnotic portrait of London before smartphones and video billboards became abundant. It takes patience to appreciate, but few games capture their era quite so vividly. That alone earns it the most lukewarm of recommendations.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox to bring the game to modern systems. Manual included. MP3 Soundtrack included as a separate download. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 11.

File Size: 469 Mb. Install Size: 633 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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