Computer Wargames

What Kind of Computer, What Kind of Wargame?

What kind of microcomputer attracted the first computer wargame publishers? At first it was whatever was available, and these were the primitive machines that first appeared in 1977. Basically these were machines you could play a game on, and were relatively cheap. Initially, most wargame software was written for the Radio Shack TRS80 Mod I. Radio Shack managed to get the jump on everybody else in that they got more PCs into more people's hands than any other single manufacturer. There were more than 200,000 of them in use by 1980. Nearly five percent of all wargamers had them. There were fewer Apple, and other, computers (which were even better game machines) and many other microcomputers, combined, than there were TRS80s at that time. The situation soon changed.

The PCs of that era were little more than a keyboard, a TV screen-type device (in some cases, it actually was a TV) and a tape recorder which is used to load in programs. This whole outfit could be gotten from Radio Shack for $850.00 as of early 1980. For that price ($1400 in 1992 dollars) you can now get a 486/33DX with four megabytes of system memory, VGA graphics and a 100 megabyte hard disk. The 486/33 is about 70 times faster than the TRS80, and can display much more realistic graphics.

The 1980 PCs had very poor graphics, especially the TRS80 (which was only black and white). One reason the Apple II (and Commodore 64) PCs eventually surpassed the TRS80 was because of still crude, but much more effective, color graphics. Despite the lack of striking graphics, there were some wargames on those early 16K and 48K machines. Note that the "K" refers to system memory in thousands of bytes (or characters) of information. Many current games require 2,000K for games, or 40 times as much as was available in 1980. The earlier machines required programmers to make every byte count, and they did. But these games were not all that attractive.

For most of the early games, the "game" generally consisted of asking you a series of questions. Even flight simulators operated in this fashion, and they sold. Then, as now, most computer simulations were solitaire programs, even though some of the earliest ones tried the two players (on one PC) route. This did not bother wargamers, as most gamers, for one reason or another, normally play their games solitaire. The solitaire aspect of computer games is automatically an asset.

Big Blue Moves In

The big change came in 1981, when IBM ("Big Blue" in the trade) introduced its PC. The IBM machine initially contained up to 256K and had larger capacity floppy disk drives. Although many early PC owners used the cassette drive to load software, most quickly converted, by the end of the 1970s, to floppy disks. But until the IBM PC came along, floppy disks generally held less than 100,000 characters of information. The first IBM floppies held 160,000 characters and soon increased to 360,000. By 1990, the average floppy disk held over a million characters. Mass storage, in the form of sealed "winchester" drives held 40 million characters and up while costing less (for the 40 million character drive) than the 1980 floppy drives.

The Conversion Era

By the mid 1980s, many manual (paper) wargames had been directly transferred to computers. This meant displaying a hex grid on the computer screen. While the screen was much smaller than the traditional game maps, this was gotten around by allowing the computer game player to look at different portions of the entire map. In effect, the computer screen became a window on a larger map. While the small screen was one disadvantage, there was an even larger problem with these computer wargames. The player had to use the keyboard and/or mouse device to move the playing pieces around. On the positive size, the player did not have to learn the game rules, as most of the procedures were imbedded in the computer program. The player did have to figure out how to use the program, but computer wargames became easier and easier to use as programmers learned more about what players were most comfortable with.

One thing wargamers were not comfortable with was the inability to know exactly what was going in inside the wargame. One major advantage of the manual games was that all the numbers and procedures were right there in front of you. Not only could the player see how the game did its stuff, but the player could, and often did, change things he did not agree with. This was not possible with computer games, although this is changing somewhat as we enter the 1990s.

Despite these drawbacks, computer wargames attracted more and more attention. In the late 1980s, a majority of the manual wargamers were playing computer wargames and an increasing number of them were not playing manual wargames at all. Part of this trend had to do with the shrinking number of manual wargamers, and new manual wargames. This was caused by the introduction of role playing games and computers and made worse by the remaining gamers getting older and having less time to play manual games. But as these gamers got older, they had more money and could afford to buy several generations of PCs and the games to go with them.

The time factor for playing manual games, and the fact that they could not be easily left sitting somewhere to be finished later (animals and small children easily upset these games in progress), gave computers another edge. While there will probably always be some manual games, computerized wargames are definitely the format of the future.

Technology Leads

Computer wargame design has been driven by technology. This creates a much more vigorous publication schedule for computer wargames. Every few years there is a dramatically new generation of machines to run the games on and topics are recycled in newer and more impressive programs to take advantage of the new technology. Through 1980 there was very little computing power available and only the most primitive graphics. When IBM entered the market in 1981, it cut short Apples increasing dominance of the market. The IBM machine was not that much of an improvement over the 1977 era Apple II, but the IBM machine had more growth potential and IBMs marketing clout enabled it to sell more PCs. By the mid 1980s, IBM machines had high resolution graphics and a new generation of machines (the "AT"). About that time, game publishers found that gamers would pay for wargames that took advantage of new hardware. In the late 1980s, publishers found out that the core of their game buying audience was increasingly buying new hardware specifically to play the latest game releases. By 1990, publishers were abandoning the old "lowest common denominator" approach to computer wargame design and publishing games that couldn't even be played on over ten millions of older 1981 era IBM PCs. The core of enthusiastic wargamers were buying so many wargames that by the early 1990s, publishers increased the minimum hardware for many of their new games on an annual basis. By 1992, many new games required a state of the art machine (a "486/25" type) for best performance. The games produced under these conditions were spectacular. The genre that benefitted most were the simulators. This type of wargame put the player in an aircraft cockpit, or tank turret and allowed you to realistically operate the equipment. Crude versions of simulators had been available from the earliest days of PC wargames. But as the PCs became more powerful, the simulators came into their own. There had been manual simulator wargames, but these were never very popular because of the enormous number of rules to be mastered in order for the simulator to be accurate and convincing.

In effect, software (the games) follows hardware (the machines to play them on). That is, computer game features are limited by what the computers they run on are capable of. In 1984, the "8 bit" PCs ruled. These were the first generation PCs, first released between 1977 and 1981. In 1984, 19% of the games sold were for the Apple II (first shipped in 1977) and 51% were for the Commodore 64 (1981). The Commodore machine had more games sold for it because the Commodore PCs sold for less than half what an Apple II cost and thus had a lot more machines out there. In 1984, games for IBM machines accounted for only eight percent of computer game sales. The new Apple Macintosh (like IBM, a second generation 16 bit machine) also had eight percent of the game market. Four years later, in 1988, the situation was radically changed. At that point, 47% of the game software sold was for IBM machines. The reason was simple, there were a lot more IBM (and clone) machines around. While at the end of 1984 there were only three million IBM PCs in use (in the US), by the end of 1986 there were over six million and by the end of 1988, nearly ten million. Although the IBM machine was intended primarily for business use, an increasing number went into homes and a lot of games were played on the office machines (which is why an increasing number of computer games had a "boss key" that, when tapped, put a dummy spreadsheet on the screen). By 1992 there were 25 million IBM type PCs in the US, with about half of them at home and nearly two thirds of all machines being used for game playing at one time or another. After word processing, games are listed as the most frequent use of machines in the home (about fifty percent admitted to playing computer games).

But it wasn't just numbers of machines that counted, but what they could do. Apples new Macintosh computer was, in many ways, more capable than the IBM. But Apple made a mistake in not having a color display right away for the Mac. In 1985 the equally advanced Amiga and Atari ST appeared (with color displays), but these were buried by the IBM avalanche. When IBM introduced high resolution graphics in the mid 1980s, IBM PCs became the most powerful and widely available machines to put games on. As more IBM owners upgraded their older machines with the higher resolution graphics and more new machines were bought, the IBM market became huge. By 1990, publishers could afford to invest up to a million dollars developing a highly popular computer Role Playing Game (RPG) and still make money on it.

Computers and Wargames

The Perils of Computer Wargame Publishing

Table of Contents

Chapter 6 Contents