About
The Great Escape is a 1986 isometric 3D prison-break game for the 48K ZX Spectrum, developed by Denton Designs, in which the player is a POW trying to escape a Nazi prison camp; it's regarded as one of the best Spectrum games of its era. This project reverse-engineers the original ZX Spectrum tape image of The Great Escape into a cross-referenced, annotated HTML disassembly and full Z80 assembly source using SkoolKit, decoding the game's graphics, characters, items, and animations along the way. The reverse-engineering itself is complete, though work continues to refine the disassembly's accuracy and readability.
How it differs from the original
Unlike a typical remake, this project aims to reproduce the original game exactly: the annotated assembly listing can be reassembled into a .TAP file that plays identically to the original release, rather than introducing new content or changes.
Getting started
After installing SkoolKit and cloning the repository, running the project's build command produces a playable .TAP file that can be loaded into a ZX Spectrum emulator; a separate build command generates the full annotated HTML disassembly for browsing directly in a web browser.
History
The project's author presented it at conferences in 2016 and again in 2020, and published a detailed write-up of the reverse-engineering effort in 2019.
Additional notes
- Related project
- A companion project ports the disassembled game logic to portable C code, developed alongside this disassembly.