 | The infamously controversial platform game, that was so much a blatant rip-off of Super Mario Bros. that the original Commodore 64 cover art declared "The brothers are history". The Great Giana Sisters was a German computer game from 1987 developed by Time Warp Productions and published by Rainbow Arts. It's similarities to the famous Nintendo platformer were so great that urban myths developed around lawsuits being filed by Nintendo, against the makers of the copy-cat game. Originally released on the Commodore 64, it was ported across to the Amiga and Atari ST, as well as the Amstrad CPC and the MSX2. However a planned Sinclair Spectrum version never saw the light of day, supposedly due to legal pressures. Due to the controversy around the game, it has gained a cult status among retro gaming fans, and it rated as one of the best ever C64 games. |
| The game has two playable characters, the "sisters" Giana and Maria. The game background and general style looks very similar to Super Mario Bros. However in the game play, instead of collecting mushrooms from blocks, the sisters gather brightly-coloured balls from blocks. After collecting the power balls, the characters do not grow large (like in Mario), but instead their hairstyle changes into Mohawks. Allowing the characters to break blocks, a feature of both games. |
Essentially the game is a cheeky tongue-in-cheek rip-off of Super Mario Bros., and for that reason alone it gained the cult status that it did. Although reviews of the game on its release were all positive.
