From the book ,"Golden Flutes & Great Escapes - How to Write Adventure Games for the Commodore 64". THE GREAT ESCAPE is a maze game. The player’s character is lost in a 100-room building. The object, of course, is to find the way out. This program was written in stages that started with a simple maze game, then added a villain and gold coins. New objects and characters were then added on as they came to mind. Each item was completely programmed before work started on a new item. This prevents the possibility of getting lost and accidentally leaving out essential steps from the program.

Each room within the maze may have up to four doors (labeled North, South, East, and West). Some rooms may not have any doors at all. When the player gets stuck, he may use a secret passageway by entering X as his move. This will randomly relocate him within the maze. To discourage overuse of this feature, each secret passageway counts as 10 moves.