The adventure brand created by a real spy.
Before Spy Quest was a book, a game or a destination, its creator — David Goutcher — spent seventeen years in covert surveillance and undercover operations. Every mission in the Spy Quest world is built from the real thing — the tradecraft, the tension, the teamwork.
Recommended as a leading product for emerging technology in schools.
INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION · FEATURED IN "LEARNING TRANSPORTED"
Welcome to the Spy Quest Agency.
The Agency is the world, and everything is a door into it. Readers join the SQA alongside agents Sam, Rebecca, Casey and Holly — this generation's spies — recruited into a world of codes, gadgets and missions that begins on the page and continues in real places: venues, missions, parties at home.
Read it. Watch it. Live it.
The series opened with Polybius: The Urban Legend and continued with The Cursed Diamond — a race to stop the heist of the century at the Smithsonian. AR triggers on the page let children watch the story unfold as they read.
Places become playable.
Spy Quest live missions have run across 46 UK shopping centres and in hotels and resorts worldwide for over a decade — clients including Hilton, Marriott, Four Seasons and Jumeirah — with the Howgate event earning two national retail awards for its commercial impact.
Literacy, undercover.
Recommended by ISTE, featured by Microsoft Education, and twice named in the UK EdTech 50 — Spy Quest turns reluctant readers into devoted ones by making the book the way into the mission.
The game was always the recruitment.
In 1981, an arcade machine appeared with no maker's name — and the best players began to vanish. The machine was Polybius. The operation behind it was Project Aratus. And the children it chose became the Shadow Squad: the Agency's first recruits, known today only by their codenames — Polybius and Lycortas — the mentors watching over a new generation of agents.
It is the premise hiding inside every Spy Quest story: a programme that recruits and trains children as secret agents through their computer games — without them knowing. Four decades on, the loop closes. The competitions are running again — in venues, online, in esports arenas across the world — watching for the same things they watched for then: the pattern-spotters, the code-breakers, the ones who don't quit. Sam, Rebecca, Casey and Holly were found this way. Today's players are tomorrow's agents — and every strand of the Spy Quest world, from the books to the venue missions to the party at home, plays out globally and leads back to the machine where it began.
"In a world where some children have significantly more contact with a screen than a page, Spy Quest offers them the opportunity to develop higher-order thinking skills: to create, to evaluate, to analyse and to apply skills within an exciting context that motivates them."
FIONA McLAREN · CRAIGBANK PRIMARY SCHOOL · SCOTTISH BOOK TRUST
Even the name is a mission.
The first novel takes its title from the most famous mystery in gaming — Polybius, the arcade machine of 1980s legend that appeared from nowhere and vanished without trace. But the name runs deeper: the historical Polybius was an ancient Greek statesman of the Achaean League, son of Lycortas, ally of Aratus — and the man whose name is carried by the Polybius square, one of the oldest ciphers in spycraft. An urban legend, an ancient intelligence network, and a foundational spy code, all in one word: a puzzle hiding in plain sight, exactly as a good spy brand should be.
And behind the fiction sits fact: David Goutcher trained officers in tradecraft and worked alongside the UK's security services — work recognised with the John Logie Baird Innovation Award among others. The authenticity is the brand.
The next chapter is bigger than the book.
Spy Quest is licensed exclusively to Polybius Interactive Ltd for the MultiVRZ platform — permanent mixed-reality venues opening in shopping centres worldwide from 2026.
- Venues
The missions become full-scale destinations. multivrz.com ↗ - Consumer products
Partnerships now open across toys, costumes, publishing and more. Become a licensee →