Old Gamers Never Die: MicroProse's 'M1 Tank Platoon' Game Review

Package of the DOS version of M1 Tank Platoon (C) 1989 MicroProse Software

In 1989 - that annus mirabilis marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, MicroProse Software published the original version of M1 Tank Platoon: The Definitive Simulation of Armored Land Warfare. 

Part vehicle simulator and part real-time tactics map-based game, M1 Tank Platoon was the first tank warfare game to break away from the "one tank against the entire Red Army" trope in other games set in a conventional World War III scenario. Instead, M1 Tank Platoon put the player in command of a four-tank platoon of M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks and, depending on the mission type selected, a wide array of supporting forces that included M2/M3 Bradleys, AH-64 Apache attack helos, OH-58 Kiowa scout helicopters, A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jets, Improved TOW Vehicles, infantry squads, 107mm mortars, 155mm artillery, and Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) support.

Created by MicroProse's in-house game development division MPS Labs, M1 Tank Platoon is set in a (then) near-future West Germany under attack by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. It was designed by Arnold Hendrick and Scott Spartanburg, and it was released for various platforms, including the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS. Because Apple II computers were not capable of handling the complex software, there was no version of M1 Tank Platoon for that platform. (This was one of the reasons why I decided, in early 1992, to buy a PC that was based on MS-DOS. My Apple II was still in good shape then, but I couldn't buy many of the new games that were coming out in the late Eighties and early Nineties.)

Title screen from M1 Tank Platoon. (C) 1989 MicroProse Software

The Game

Like most of MicroProse's military-themed games, M1 Tank Platoon was designed to allow players to ease into the simulation at their own pace. It came with a thick manual that not only covered the basics of how to play the game but was also a primer of modern armored warfare and U.S. Army tactical doctrine. I no longer have my manual, but it was almost 200 pages long and had a lot of charts and line drawings that illustrated such concepts as how to best use terrain, the pros and cons of various formations, how to "shoot on the move," and the intricacies of the M1A1 Abrams MBT.

To acclimate players into the ins-and-outs of armored warfare, M1 Tank Platoon had several options for gameplay:

1. Static Gunnery
2. Moving Gunnery
3. Single Engagements (6 types of missions)
4. Campaign (a series of single engagements that, together, comprised a simulation of World War III in West Germany)

Ideally, you'd start playing M1 Tank Platoon by choosing the gunnery training scenarios first, beginning with Static Gunnery and working your way up to Moving Gunnery. In Static Gunnery, you led your platoon of four tanks around a typical West German-based training range and engaged stationary mockups of Soviet trucks, BMPs, BRDMs, and various T- series of tanks. These mockups did not shoot back, but the course was set up so you could practice various techniques used in armored warfare, including the use of armor-piercing sabot and High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) rounds, the M2 .50 caliber machine guns, thermal sights, and smoke grenade launchers. 

Moving Gunnery training took place in the same tank range. This time around, though, the "enemy" was a company-sized unit of mobile Warsaw Pact vehicle simulators that would simulate a typical Soviet-style armored attack on a NATO-held objective. Again, in training mode, the enemy did not fire at you, but you could practice different ways of defending a position, including firing from hull-down positions on a hill's "reverse slope" or by active counterattacks. 

Single Engagements simulated six types of missions typically assigned to M1 tank platoons. 

The six Single Engagement missions: here I have highlighted the Defend Position mission, as you can tell by the briefing blackboard on the left side of the screenshot. (C) 1989 MicroProse Software 

In Single Engagements, the Soviet forces not only moved, but they also fired ordnance at your units. You'd get "laser warning" audio prompts when tanks with laser rangefinders "lit up" your tanks before they fired at you, and you'd see a variety of missiles and shells coming your way. Even more important, in Single Engagements, all of this incoming fire could damage or even destroy your Abrams tanks and/or kill individual crew members.

Single Engagements were randomly generated battles based on six basic mission types. The only constant factor in these missions is that at the core, you commanded four M1 tanks, each one with a crew of four. For added realism, each crewman (tank commander, gunner, loader, and driver) started out with random skill levels that ranged from Inept to Expert. This meant that each vehicle would have different reaction times that affected how it performed in battle (especially when you played the game exclusively in Map-Only Mode. Of course, you never started a single mission with a crew member that had a skill rating better than "Good" unless you had been playing with the same platoon for a while, and the four crew members had varying skill levels that improved with either promotions or awards for valor.

The ultimate challenge in M1 Tank Platoon was, naturally, the Campaign. As in other MicroProse games with Campaign or Entire War modes, the outcome of one battle often affected future engagements. If you led your platoon (and its supporting units) to victory after victory, then NATO would win World War III. If you lost, the Warsaw Pact would conquer West Germany and vanquish the Alliance.

View from the tank commander's open cupola position. The graphics are appallingly primitive by today's standards, but this game came out shortly before Intel introduced its 486 microprocessor. (C) 1989 MicroProse Software

 M1 Tank Platoon could be played in a variety of ways. You could confine yourself to one tank and handle a single role (tank commander, gunner, or driver) and let the game's artificial intelligence run the other positions in your Abrams, or you could (as many players often did) jump from station to station and even from one tank to another and "step into the role" of another crew member/tank commander. You could not directly jump into an AH-64 Apache or command a Dragon team, although you could give orders to those support units on the map.

The "virtual sand table." This is the Static Gunnery mission map, which shows the course of the gunnery range, the terrain, and the location of the "enemy" vehicles that the tank platoon can see. (C) 1989 MicroProse Software

You could also try to play the game as a "virtual sand table" exercise, but this required you to pay a lot of attention to detail and to trust your simulated crews' skills. Playing on the map alone involved using the cursor (the yellow "crosshairs" seen above) and various keyboard commands that told your tank crews where to go, how fast to move, when to shoot, what formation to use, and so on.

I never played the game in "all-vehicle only" or "map-only" mode. Instead, I used both modes, especially in Single Engagements and Campaigns. This gave me some appreciation of how challenging it is to command four Abrams tanks and coordinate them with supporting units, as well as how tough it must be to lead a small unit in battle.

Obviously, as in all of MicroProse Software's games, M1 Tank Platoon was a depiction of war with all of the nastier elements edited out. It was accurate enough that a reservist who had graduated from the Army's Armored Officer's Basic Course gave it a "thumbs up" in a review for Computer Gaming, and - as I said earlier - covered the basic concepts of 1980s era armored warfare within the limits of a commercially-available sim. Yes, it was sanitized; you never saw blood or gory images of soldiers being killed.  But if you were unlucky in battle, you'd lose individual crew members or even entire vehicles to enemy tank cannon rounds or anti-tank missiles.

Despite its limited graphics, M1 Tank Platoon was a decent video game/armored warfare simulator. It had its limitations; the visuals didn't quite place you in war-torn West Germany, and Soviet tanks and other vehicles were rendered in red-and-brown paint schemes that screamed: "This is a video game!" And although its Cold War-turned-hot scenario was interesting, by the time the game was released it was rendered somewhat irrelevant by real-life events such as the fall of Communist regimes in the now-vanished Warsaw Pact and the removal of the hated Berlin Wall in November of 1989.