Bureau 13

Take-Two Interactive's February 1995 graphic adventure, published by GameTek, adapts Tri Tac Games' paranormal-investigation tabletop RPG into a point-and-click party game where the player picks two of six agents - Priest, Hacker, Witch, Thief, Vampire, and Mech - and assigns each character's specialty to puzzle solutions across a single supernatural case.

Setting and story

The fiction is lifted from the 1983 Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic RPG: a deniable U.S. agency hunts vampires, witches, and other paranormal entities on American soil. The campaign sends the chosen pair after a small-town occult conspiracy, blending horror, science fantasy, and pulp espionage in pre-rendered locations and CGI cutscenes.

Gameplay

The party mechanic is the hook: each agent class unlocks different paths, so the Thief can quietly pick a lock that the Mech would simply kick down, and the Witch can sense auras the Hacker handles with a laptop. The interface itself drew unfavorable contemporary reviews for clumsy menus and inventory handling, even when reviewers conceded the role-driven puzzle design was inventive.

Engine and technical changes

Bureau 13 ships as a CD-ROM title for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x with 256-color SVGA backgrounds and full-motion video sequences. The score is unusual for an adventure of its scale: composer Mike Bross assembled a band, The Heavy Skies, specifically to record five original full-length songs for the game.

Development and release

Take-Two developed the title using the same in-house team behind Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, with GameTek handling worldwide distribution from February 1995. Planned Amiga and Amiga CD32 ports were cancelled, and no Macintosh build shipped, so Mac players accessed it only via DOS emulators such as DOSBox.

Reception and legacy

Reception was middling: Next Generation gave it 2 of 5 stars, calling it basic but original enough for a second look, and PC Gamer's Richard Cobbett later called it "a really dumb game with some clever ideas" undermined by "the clumsiest interfaces ever inflicted on the world." The game faded quickly and is best remembered today as one of Take-Two's earliest published adventures, predating the Rockstar era.