The Great Giana Sisters

The Great Giana Sisters for Commodore 64 is a 1987 side-scrolling platform game from West German developer Time Warp and publisher Rainbow Arts. It stars Giana, a young girl swept into an unsettling dream world of castles, caves, monsters, and hidden routes. The C64 original arrived at a time when fast, arcade-style platform games were still unusual on many home computers, giving players a colorful horizontal adventure built around running, jumping, and carefully exploring each screen. Its title music and in-game soundtrack were composed by Chris Huelsbeck, while Armin Gessert handled the C64 programming and Manfred Trenz created the artwork.

Giana's aim is to work through the dream world and reach the large diamond that can wake her. Stages scroll horizontally as she moves, with pits, spikes, fire, hostile creatures, platforms, blocks, and other hazards standing between her and the exit. A joystick controls movement and jumps, and safe progress depends on judging leaps, keeping momentum under control, and reacting before the advancing view leaves a platform behind. Each level also has a time limit, so the game rewards both observation and decisive movement instead of leisurely searching every corner.

The basic moves soon grow into a broader collection-and-survival loop. Giana can bounce on many enemies, while useful objects and special blocks provide temporary offensive or defensive advantages. Power-ups can give her a projectile attack, put onscreen enemies to sleep, clear enemies away with a bomb, or award extra lives. Other finds help reveal the game's appetite for secrets: players can uncover concealed areas and alternate paths rather than treating every stage as a simple straight line. The changing caves, outdoor stretches, and fortress-like spaces give the long journey a different rhythm even though its essential controls remain direct.

The Commodore 64 version supports one or two players. In a solo game, the player guides Giana; in the multiplayer mode, a second player takes the role of her sister Maria. That sisterly premise is woven into the game's dream setting rather than being a separate competitive mode, and it lets two people tackle the same obstacle courses together. Giana and Maria share the need to protect their limited lives, make clean jumps, and use the available power-ups well. The approachable joystick layout makes the challenge easy to understand, but later hazards and route choices demand increasingly reliable timing.

The Great Giana Sisters is also closely associated with the history of 1980s home-computer games because of its conspicuous resemblance to Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. Rainbow Arts took the game off sale after receiving a warning from Nintendo, making its commercial availability unusually brief in some territories. That episode belongs to the story of the release, but the C64 game has its own characters, dream-world framing, enemy designs, power-ups, music, and stage material. It is therefore best understood as a period European platformer shaped by a major contemporary influence, rather than as a port of a Nintendo game.

Its C64 debut came before versions for several other home-computer systems, and it became the starting point for the Giana Sisters series. A later 1989 follow-up, Hard'n'Heavy, moved away from the sisters and into a science-fiction setting, while later games returned to the Giana name in new forms. For players exploring the Commodore 64 library, The Great Giana Sisters remains a notable example of the machine's scrolling platform design: a dreamlike quest with secret-filled levels, memorable SID music, a female lead, and the option to share the journey with Maria.