Old Gamers Never Die: Refighting World War III, 1980s style, with MicroProse/Interplay's Reissue of 'M1 Tank Platoon'

© 1989, 2020 MicroProse/Interplay Entertainment

 As you know, this old grognard cut his wargaming teeth back in the 1980s. First, of course, with strategy games such as Avalon Hill's 1984 Gulf Strike, SSI's Conflict 1985, and MicroProse Software's Command Series trilogy (Crusade in Europe, Decision in the Desert, and Conflict in Vietnam). Later, when I made the transition from my first computer (an Apple IIe that I received in 1987 from my dad's brother Sixto), I started playing simulations of modern aircraft (F-15 Strike Eagle III, Red Storm Rising, and F-117A Nighthawk: Stealth Fighter 2.0.)

One game that I played a lot between 1992 and 1995 was MicroProse's M1 Tank Platoon, a simulation of armored land warfare in the late Cold War period set in a World War III scenario pitting a U.S. Army tank platoon against Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invading West Germany. 

Designed by Arnold Hendrick and programmed by a MicroProse team led by Scott Spanburg and Darrell Dennies, M1 Tank Platoon: The Definitive Simulation of Armored Land Combat was released in October of 1989. Ironically, the game came out only a few days before the Berlin Wall started to come down and East Germany opened the Inner German Border - the first decisive step in the process of German reunification and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. 

Image Credit: Moby Games © 1989, 2020 MicroProse/Interplay Entertainment

Although the graphics - which were designed by Max Remington III - were not particularly striking (they have that cheesy-looking blocky look common to many "3D" video games of the late 1980s), the game struck the usually fine balance between realism and playability. As far as the AI tactics and performance of weapons systems were concerned, M1 Tank Platoon was as accurate as possible without violating national security or revealing U.S. Army secrets. The game design is based on extensive open-source research on Soviet and Western military equipment in service on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

M1 Tank Platoon was also created with input from civilians and retired military personnel with a background in armored warfare. It even listed Lt. Col. William Gregor, U.S. Army, as its technical advisor. 

Now, there were other tank-centric simulations by other publishers in the market when M1 Tank Platoon was published 33 years ago, Some of them even had similar titles (I played one called M1A1 a few times) and featured better graphics, But they were all variations of one theme: a single tank driving around and blasting tank-shaped objects that tried to destroy you before you destroyed them. There wasn't any realistic depiction of combined arms warfare at the small unit level; just the usual Battlezone video game trope but with targets that looked vaguely like 1980s-era Soviet vehicles. 

M1 Tank Platoon was the first attempt to depict how a conventional Third World War in West Germany might be fought if the Cold War heated up before the 1990s. As the blurb on the back of the box describes the game:

Image Credit: Moby Games © 1989, 2020 MicroProse/Interplay Entertainment

Four M1 Abrams Tanks. Four soldiers in each. That's Four Tanks, Sixteen Men. And you control the whole shooting match.

Anyway, I did not buy M1 Tank Platoon until 1992 or so; by then, the Cold War, aka the First Cold War, had ended and a confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact now was a topic for alternative history books rather than a threat that loomed in our horizon. I still played it for a few years despite the increasingly obsolescent graphics and unimpressive sound design. I stopped playing M1 Tank Platoon not because I was tired of it, but because as MS-DOS was supplanted by Windows 95 and its successors, the game became incompatible with computers that ran on newer operating systems. 

The view from the gunsight on thermal mode. © 1989, 2020 MicroProse/Interplay Entertainment

MicroProse published a sequel, M1 Tank Platoon II, in 1998, nine years after the release of the original game. It featured many of the same basic game concepts – armored warfare at the platoon command level and centered on the M1 Abrams main battle tank. Like M1 Tank Platoon, the sequel also featured NATO vs. Warsaw Pact combat with armored units. 

Unlike its older sibling, M1 Tank Platoon II also featured the first real-life war in which the Abrams tank had seen action: Operation Desert Storm. Here, too, American armored forces fight against Soviet-built military equipment used by the Iraqi army, but this time around the game design team, led once more by Scott Spanburg, based M1 Tank Platoon II on data from the Gulf War. So, if the 1989 game explored what the untried-in-combat Abrams could do on the battlefield, M1 Tank Platoon II depicted for gamers what the Abrams did in Kuwait and Iraq in February and March of 1991. 

I mention all this "ancient history" because I have long wanted to play both versions of M1 Tank Platoon. The first iteration, of course, I sought out for sheer nostalgia, and M1 Tank Platoon II because I had not played it before MicroProse Software closed its doors in the early 2000s after a series of mergers and acquisitions. 

If you follow my WordPress blog at all, you'll see that I wrote about how I discovered that Interplay Entertainment has the rights for many of the original MicroProse games and re-released the M1 Tank Platoon duology on Steam and Epic Games. As a matter of fact, I bought both games this weekend - separately and not in a bundle - for $9.99 each. 

Today I played M1 Tank Platoon for about 45 minutes; I am, of course, familiar with it already, so even though I sometimes must refer to my PDF copy of the game manual, I managed to get back into the role of platoon leader. 

Yeah, the graphics are still clunky, and the sound is hilariously primitive, but once I figured out how to slow the game down a bit, I was able to lead my platoon to its first 100% efficiency-rated victory.