Old Gamers Never Die: One of My Favorite 1980s Wargames, "Crusade in Europe', is Available (Finally!) on Steam!

© 1986, 2022 MicroProse/Atari

 Back in the late 1980s, when I was in college, my father’s brother Sixto gave me my first computer, an Apple IIe with a color monitor and an ImageWriter printer. I had learned to use Apple computers at Miami-Dade Community College’s Apple Lab, so naturally, when I had an opportunity to get a computer of my own, I chose one that I was familiar with instead of what was then the less user-friendly IBM PC.

I used my new computer primarily for college-related stuff; when I got it, I was already two-thirds of the way into the Spring Term at Miami-Dade and had a paper due for my Music Appreciation class. (As I recall, it wasn’t a term paper but a comparison of two recordings of a theme by John Williams from the score of The Empire Strikes Back.) I received my Apple IIe only a few days before it was due, so it proved extremely useful to my academic endeavors right off the bat.

Obviously, I also used my computer for gaming. Hell, I’m nearly 60 years old and I still use computers for gaming. That’s not their main purpose in my life, but I am not going to lie and say that I only use PCs to write screenplays or the Great American Novel. I was a gamer in 1987, and I’m still a gamer in 2022. Not gonna lie about that.

© 1986, 2022 MicroProse/Atari

I don’t remember exactly when I purchased Crusade in Europe, which was one of three games in MicroProse Software’s Command Series of strategy wargames. (The other two were Decision in the Desert and Conflict in Vietnam, which I purchased in 1989). I do remember that before I bought Crusade, I had already played the similarly designed World War III game NATO Commander, also from MicroProse. I loved NATO Commander because it was easy to play but was still a challenging strategy game in which I played the eponymous role of a Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR) in command of the Western Alliance’s military forces during an invasion of West Germany by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.

There are five main scenarios in Crusade in Europe, but since four of these have at least two variants, there are 14 variants in all. © 1986, 2022 MicroProse/Atari

I probably ordered Crusade in Europe from the product catalog that came with one of my MicroProse games back then. It was, after all, a simulation of a campaign that I am keenly interested in – the Allied campaign in Northwest Europe of 1944-45 – and it looked like the gameplay would be similar to NATO Commander – a scrollable map-and-symbols “accelerated real-time strategy game.” (It’s also possible that I bought it at Babbage’s in the Miami International Mall, the closest computer software store near my house.)  That part, I don’t recall. I do recall that Crusade in Europe was pricey ($39.99), but not excessively so.

To make a long story short, Crusade in Europe quickly became one of my favorite games of all time. It was not graphically impressive – compared to the graphics in Strategic Command WWII: World at War, the graphic user’s interface (GUI) is primitive. The maps are simplistic, as are the unit symbols, and the game lacks an immersive soundtrack that puts you on the battlefields of Western Europe during the struggle against Hitler’s Third Reich.

But as I wrote yesterday in my review of Crusade in Europe over on A Certain Point of View, Too:

Once you accept that Crusade in Europe is (1) a strategy game that is the digital equivalent of an old-fashioned map board and unit-counters wargame and (2) that it was made in the mid-1980s, a time when even owning a computer was still a novelty, you will enjoy it.

 

The situation on June 14, 1944 (D+8) © 1986, 2022 MicroProse/Atari

As I said earlier, even though Crusade in Europe emphasizes historical accuracy as far as initial troop deployments, reinforcement schedules, replacement rates, weather and terrain effects, and the importance of supply lines, it is delightfully easy to play. Crusade in Europe is designed to let you refight the campaign in Northwest Europe ­from the beaches of Normandy to the Ardennes forests and come away with some understanding of the strategies involved but without the mind-boggling complexity of more complex and detailed games like Gary Grigsby’s War in the West.

I mention all of this because until recently, Crusade in Europe, like its Command Series stablemates Decision in the Desert and Conflict in Vietnam, was out-of-print and only available in “abandonware” sites where you could play them from a browser or attempt to download them in. ZIP files.

Happily, Atari, which owns the rights to the original MicroProse studio’s works because of mergers and acquisitions in the 1990s and early 2000s, has reissued the three Command Series games on Steam (and possibly GOG.com). The price is amazingly affordable – each title is offered for $6.99 on Steam – and the game is unchanged; the only tweaks Atari made were to make the old DOS programs work with modern Windows computers with a “DOS emulator” and to deactivate the copy protection protocol where you must type in a code word from the game manual to play past the demo.

Because I’ve played Crusade in Europe from an abandonware site over the past two years, I did not have a hard time getting back to the “swing of things” with the game. I still wish that a game studio – perhaps even the “new” MicroProse – would reboot this game with updated graphics and immersive soundtrack. Sort of like a blend of Crusade in Europe’s easy gameplay with the “look” of Strategic Command WWII: World at War.

However, as a longtime fan of Crusade in Europe, I am happy to just be able to play a legit copy of this fun-to-play and often exciting wargame!