Silent Service
The Pacific war, fought on instruments, by someone who can hear you.
The original
A WWII submarine simulator that made a virtue of what the hardware could not draw. You ran a patrol in the Pacific from the chart, the sonar and the periscope, and the thing you were hunting was also hunting you — a destroyer that had your bearing and a stock of depth charges.
How it played
An approach was a geometry problem under time pressure: work out the target's course and speed from a handful of observations, get ahead of it, and fire torpedoes at where it is going to be. The periscope was rationed by common sense rather than by rule — every look risked being seen.
Then the other half. Once you had attacked, you were a slow, blind thing being searched for from above, managing depth and silence while charges came down. The game switched from predator to prey without changing a single mechanic, which is a very elegant trick.
Why it holds up
It is a simulation built around information rather than switches. You are not being asked to operate a submarine; you are being asked to work out where something is, from very little, before it works out where you are. That is a game design, not a manual, and it is why it is still playable when far more detailed sims are not.
Made by
Sid Meier, MicroProse
First appeared
1985
On
Home computers
Genre
Simulation
Taken after by
The build on this site that owes it.