Les Ripoux

Les Ripoux is a French comedy movie by Claude Zidi released in 1984 – it is a story of two corrupted Paris policemen who take kickbacks from the minor criminals, street traders and shop owners. Bertrand Brocard and his team at Cobra Soft / Hitech Productions created a game following that story – which turns to be a rather unique ‘simulator of a corrupted policeman’.

The game mechanics is somewhat similar to the one in the ‘Meurtres’ series by the same authors: we walk the street of Paris meeting people and talking to them, but the gameplay is much more complex. It is worth mentioning that the game uses more than 25 keyboard keys for controls: we can arrest suspects, search them, check our position on the map, take a car ride, or a police car ride, or a subway ride etc. The main goal is to collect enough kickbacks to be able to realize the dream of the policeman in the movie – to retire and buy a PMU-bar near the horse racing place (and that’s a lot of money, 2 millions of ‘new’ francs). Besides, we still have to do our police job as well, visiting the Police Commissioner each morning and following his orders, arresting the criminals etc.