Old Gamers Never Die: Remembering 'Red Storm Rising'

A Mk. 48 ADCAP torpedo is about to make a Soviet Kresta II cruiser's day very, very bad in this screenshot from a session of Red Storm Rising. (C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

I've owned quite a few personal computers since the mid-1980s. My first one, an Apple II, was a gift from my late father's older brother Sixto; I remember it fondly because, you know, it was my first real computer. It was the most expensive of all the PCs; with its Imagewriter II printer and color monitor, it cost my uncle $2100 plus whatever the sales tax was in 1987. It was not my first choice; the computer that I'd really wanted to get was a Macintosh, but when my uncle asked the sales rep at Computer Village how much that one cost, the reply was a cool $3200. My uncle said that was a bit too pricey, so I ended up with an Apple II, which was my second choice. (I already used them in my college campus' Apple Lab, so I was familiar with them and liked them well enough.)

Since I was in college in the spring of 1987, I used my Apple II mostly for school writing assignments and submissions for the campus student newspaper. But I was also in my 20's, so I had a modest collection of games made for the Apple II family. Some were sports-themed titles, such as Summer Games or Street Soccer. Others were rudimentary flight simulators along the lines of Wings of Fury by Broderbund Games or F-15 Strike Eagle by MicroProse.

In addition, I had a trio of submarine simulations, Gato, MicroProse's Silent Service, and an Epyx Games title (whose name escapes me at the moment) which allowed you to command either American submarines in the Pacific Theater or German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. All of these were set during World War II, and they all looked, played, and sounded differently. 

But even though I loved my Apple II computer, I noticed that there were not that many great  games for it. Or, better said, developers were making cooler-looking, more complex games for computers that ran on DOS or other operating systems/computers such as the Amiga or Commodore 64. 

Eventually, I ended up getting a generic home-built IBM-compatible PC to supplement my Apple II; I was doing some consulting work then, and I was learning how to use Windows and Microsoft Word for that business anyway. But I also wanted to play games such as  Red Storm Rising, Silent Service II and Sid Meier's Civilization, and those didn't have Apple II editions.

Title sequence from Red Storm Rising, (C) 1988 MicroProse Software (later MPS Labs) and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

I think, looking back, that the game that most influenced my decision to get what was then called an "IBM clone" was Red Storm Rising. 

Based on the 1986 best-selling novel by Tom Clancy and Larry Bond, Red Storm Rising was a submarine warfare simulation. It was designed by MicroProse's legendary co-founder Sid Meier and Arnold Kendrick; various programmers get credit for doing the different versions of the game (IBM, Commodore 64, etc.).

Per the "abandoned software site ClassicReload.com: 

As with the USS Chicago in the book, the game concentrates on the Norwegian Sea theater, placing the player as captain of a single USN nuclear-powered submarine tasked to disrupt Soviet forces in the area between the Kola Peninsula and the Greenland-Iceland-UK barrier. Missions may include interdiction of tanker fleets, stopping amphibious landing forces, eliminating Soviet wolfpack submarines and many others. The background story remains true to the book's plot but the final mission is always to prevent the Soviets from launching nuclear missiles by locating and eliminating their ballistic-missile submarines or SSBNs.

The player may choose any of four different timelines. Starting in the early 80's limits the player to Sturgeon and early Los Angeles- class submarines, but the Soviets have weak sonars, whereas starting in the late 80s allows the player to use the improved Los Angeles class and even the new Seawolf subs. Weapons improve accordingly, with Tomahawk missiles and improved Mark 48 torpedoes included in later timelines but the Soviets begin deploying nuclear powered aircraft carriers and much better ASW ships.

Screenshot of the "story setup" scene (derived directly from Clancy's novel) that explains why the USSR starts the war against NATO. (C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

I have been a submarine warfare aficionado since I was old enough to read and watch war movies. Movies such as Operation Pacific and Run Silent, Run Deep were must-see TV for me when I was growing up in Miami. And in college, Clancy's World War III novel was a book that I read and re-read at least once a year, sometimes more.

So, yeah. I bought the game in 1993; it had already been out for four years so I got it at a relatively low price at Babbage's. The graphics were pretty cool for a 1989 game, but they were designed for PCs that ran on Intel 386 processors and DOS, so they look awfully primitive in the late 2010s. I was fine with that; I ignored the cheesiness of the VGA graphics and the AdLib sound card.

I am not sure how long I was able to play Red Storm Rising on my 1990s-eras computers (I went through at least two custom-built PCs between 1993 and 1999 because PCs evolved so fast that they became obsolescent every 18 months); I probably last played the game in 1998 on one of my last PCs with 3.5-in. floppy drives. After that, I can't say. I know that I was still playing Silent Service II as late as 2004 on my last eMachines PC with a floppy disk drive; but older games like Red Storm Rising and M-1 Tank Platoon were incompatible with that PC (which ran on Windows XP but could still play some of the late 1990s' DOS games I had.). To be honest with you, dear reader, I don't remember the year in which I stopped playing Red Storm Rising. Too long ago, I imagine.

Recently, though I came across a couple of sites where you can look for (and play or download) old games that were made for various platforms, including DOS and earlier versions of Windows but ran mostly on DOS. 

I've already mentioned in this blog my re-discovery of Crusade in Europe, a game that I wish Sid Meier would reboot at Firaxis Games, the company where he now designs games and whatnot. I found that treasure on www.myabandonedware.com a few weeks ago. I found Red Storm Rising at ClassicReload.com yesterday while I searched for another old favorite, Silent Service II.

The game can be played on modern computers via what is called a DOS emulator. I'm told that you can download the game and such an emulator, but I'm not adept at doing that kind of thing so I play Red Storm Rising at the site from the browser.

To get past the "copy-protect" feature and be able to play Red Storm Rising, you have to identify the warship by its class name. In the old days, all I had to do was get my manual and look up the USSR ships and then type the class name at the prompt. I don't have my copy of the Red Storm Rising manual handy, but I played the game so much that I can identify most of the Soviet ships just by looking at the illustrations. This one, by the way, is a Kresta II cruiser.  (As for the A.D. Grant pseudonym....the game never lets me write Alex Diaz-Granados. Too many characters.) (C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

My game-playing experience on ClassicReload.com has been rather mixed. I can play single missions to my heart's content; it took a bit of patience and a lot of guesswork to recall the keyboard commands for Red Storm Rising (MicroProse games used to include helpful keyboard overlays and/or reference cards that made game play so much easier. Alas...I threw away my keyboard overlay in the late 1990s, so I had to resort to trial and error until I had the basic commands down again.)

Red Storm Rising requires that the player use various displays in order to command his or her nuclear sub. Doesn't matter which class of sub one has; there are a lot of sensor and weapons control screens that a captain needs to look at during battle, including:

The Tactical Display:

(C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

Weapons Control Display:

(C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

Torpedo Defense Display:

(C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

Ship Database Display:

(C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

Acoustic Signature Display

(C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

There are a few more of these, but you get my drift. 

So, yeah. I had to relearn, sans manual, which of the F-buttons (Function) buttons activates which screen. F1, for instance, is the prompt for the Tactical Display, while F2 activates the Weapons Control Display, and so on. (F9 and F10 tell your Dive Officer and your Helm Officer how deep to dive and what course to set.) 

There are, of course, a lot of other commands I had to try and guess what does what. To fire torpedoes - a sub's main weapon - players have to hit the 4 key. To reload the tube (it's not an automatic function), you have to hit Shift-4 to issue that order. 

If you are playing single missions only, you won't see too many of the story-centered graphics in Red Storm Rising.  The most you'll see in this mode is the little cutaways to your sub firing a weapon: 

(C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

Or the end result of your weapon hitting its target:

Here, a Russian cruiser is about to be hit by a Mk.48 ADCAP (Advanced Capability) torpedo. (C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd. 

Glub...glub...glub. Another Soviet sub goes down to the bottom of the sea. Dosvidania, Ivan (C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.!

If you play the Red Storm Rising campaign game, you get to see more cool stuff, such as a situation map that graphically displays the progress of World War III:

If you look closely at this graphic, you'll notice that Warsaw Pact forces (red) have made inroads into NATO territory (green) in Norway and West Germany. A Soviet surface group (red diamond icon) can be seen just west of the yellow NATO patrol plane icon off the coast of Norway. My sub? It's just off to the north of Scotland...it's that yellow "u" shaped symbol.

And you'll also see "news updates" that reflect how well (or how poorly) you and your crew did in battle against the Russians:

(C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

If you perform especially well in a mission, you'll be given medals in recognition of your achievements in battle: 

(C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.

What you won't see, at least from my experiences on ClassicReload, is the end of the game. I'm not sure if it's because I'm not a registered member or if its a software issue, but once I reach the mid-game stage in the campaign, the game has hiccups. It freezes or just acts...weird. 

Update: 

As it turns out, I tried playing Red Storm Rising on Chrome instead of Microsoft Explorer, which is where I first tried out the game. And guess what? It works so much better. 

Yes, I was able to play the Red Storm Rising campaign all the way through to the final SSBN-hunt. I am rusty and the Soviet Typhoon-class sub escaped, but the war ended with a NATO victory.

I don't plan on downloading the game; it's small and doesn't use too much memory, but I am hesitant about getting a DOS emulator and inadvertently screwing up my computer. Still, Red Storm Rising is still as fun a game as I remember.