COLD WAR FOES UNITE ON CD\Spycraft mixes real espionage, high-tech savvy.

Byline: Dennis Anderson Associated Press 

Two old Cold War enemies, former CIA Director William Colby and ex-KGB general Oleg Kalugin, are going Hollywood in a high-tech computer game that features their real-life espionage experience.

The veteran spies, once deadly antagonists in the East-West showdown, now shake hands, smile for the cameras and play themselves in the interactive CD-ROM game thriller titled "Spycraft: The Great Game."

"Hollywood is great fun. . . . This is the most exciting time in my life," said Kalugin, who previously got his thrills in the theft of U.S. rocket fuel formulas and supervising the spying activities of American traitors.

This venture teams up the old enemies, who met in 1991 at a conference on East-West cooperation. Now the two star in a multimillion-dollar game that fuses Clancy-style gadgetry with LeCarre-like tension and Hollywood production techniques.

"We've got lots of former enemies," Colby said in a telephone interview from Washington. "We fought a lot of them, and now we are allies."

Many scenes in the game were shot on 35 mm film. The producers used special effects teams that worked on movies such as "Jurassic Park" and "JFK."

Crowds of extras gather in a digital copy of Red Square and more than two dozen actors flesh out the cast, including a blustering politician who bears a passing resemblance to ultranationalist presidential candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

The politician gets shot by an assassin and the player has to figure out whodunit. The CD-ROM game player unmasks the plot with help from Colby and Kalugin, who join forces to save civilization from a Russian mafia cabal.

"We have many kinds of games used in the government for training and to stretch the minds a bit," Colby said. "Those games are normally strategic. This one is at the case officer level."

To solve the case, players are shown a dazzling array of gizmos, including satellite imagery, sound detection devices and weaponry that would make James Bond's armorer green with envy.

In an advance from previous CD-ROM entertainments, the Spycraft player can vault onto the Internet and access the World Wide Web pages for the real CIA, FBI and other federal agencies, using Intelink, a fictional intelligence communications network that really goes on line.

"What's going on is a new and very powerful form of entertainment," said Alan Gershenfeld, vice president for production at Los Angeles-based Activision, which made the game. "I don't think it will replace movies, but it's going to be as big as movies."

Through the on-line feature, the game blends real world news reports with fictional scenarios in playing time that can last up to 40 hours.

"The intelligence communications system made it much more dynamic, interactive and accessible," said James Adams, Washington bureau chief for The Sunday Times of London.

Adams, author of fact and fiction books about espionage, wrote the game for Activision, a multimedia entertainment company.

The game, hitting stores this month, will sell for about $50.

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Photo Former bigwigs of espionage join forces in Spycraft The Great Game to be released on CD-ROM. Associated Press