Old Gamers Never Die: Running Silent, Running Deep with 'Silent Service II' and 'Cold Waters'

HIJMS Shokaku burns in Silent Service II's An Embarrassment of Riches scenario. © 1990, 2015 MicroProse/Retroism (Tommo)

 Hi, there, Dear Reader.

As you know, my favorite video games or computer simulations deal with some aspects of military conflict. Whether it’s a flight simulator along the lines of F-15 Strike Eagle II or a land warfare sim like M1 Tank Platoon or a grand-strategy game along the lines of Strategic Command WWII: World at War, if it is action-packed, historically interesting, yet not so complex that you must earn a degree in Military Science to play it, the wargame genre is my favorite.

Within that category, there is a sub-category of wargame that I am fascinated by, and that’s the submarine simulation game.

"Logbook" of USS Cavalla, © 1990, 2015 MicroProse/Retroism (Tommo)

Since 1987, I have owned quite a few submarine-centric games. The first one I owned was Silent Service, which was published in 1985 by the original MicroProse Software. Designed by Sid Meier and released for various platforms, including IBM PCs, Apple II, Commodore 64, Amiga, and the Tandy TSR-80, Silent Service depicted submarine combat in the Pacific during World War II. I also owned the Apple IIe version of Gato, a similarly themed WWII sub sim published in 1984 by Spectrum Holobyte but was somewhat less appealing to me for its approach to depicting U.S. Navy subs – in this case, USS Growler – in their campaign to destroy Japanese shipping in the Asia-Pacific Theater of Operations.

This was around the time that I also became a Tom Clancy fan, so of course, once I had transitioned from my Apple IIe to what we now call PCs (first on MS-DOS, then on various versions of Windows), I got into various submarine games that depicted modern nuclear-powered “fast attack boats.” In the 1980s and 1990s, I played such games as 688 Attack Sub and its sequel Seawolf SSN-21, both designed by John W. Ratcliffe and Paul Grace, Red Storm Rising, Silent Service II, and Tom Clancy’s SSN.

If you follow either of my blogs – I have another version of A Certain Point of View here -you know that most of those DOS-based games (with the exception of Silent Service II) are either not compatible with modern computers and Windows 10 and 11 or can only be found on “abandonware” websites. I have not owned a “legit” copy of Red Storm Rising since the early 2000s, so of all those titles, the only game that has been revived and reissued on Steam, GOG.com, and other authorized sources is Silent Service II.

You also probably remember that I also play Killerfish Games’ Cold Waters, a spiritual heir to Red Storm Rising that was published in 2017. Cold Waters is my current favorite contemporary game, and I play it at least once a week, especially on weekends when there’s really nothing else for me to do here.

Yesterday I played one mission (An Embarrassment of Riches) from Silent Service II. It’s based on the real-life encounter – on June 19, 1944 – between the Gato-class sub USS Cavalla and a Japanese carrier, Shokaku – as part of the Battle of the Philippine Sea. I did all right; I sank the Shokaku and a Japanese heavy cruiser without being depth-charged or even detected by the stricken ships’ escorting destroyers.

USS Seawolf is one of my favorite boats in Cold Waters. © 2017 Killerfish Games

And earlier this afternoon I played Junks on Parade, a challenging scenario in which USS Seawolf must destroy a People’s Liberation Army Navy invasion force headed for Taiwan across the Formosa (or Taiwan) Strait.

I have played Junks on Parade many times, but this time around I wanted to see what happened if I restricted myself to using only the Mk-48 ADCAP torpedoes and forego the use of UGM-84 Harpoon missiles.

See, in this scenario, your boat is in shallow waters and can’t dive deeper than 220 feet without running into the sea bottom. Also, there are several Chinese PLAN ASW fixed-wing patrol planes and torpedo-armed helicopters that give the convoy aerial protection. Going to periscope depth to “paint” the surface group with your radar and/or firing Harpoons in that environment is not necessarily the wisest decision you can make as a submarine commander. At least, not if you want to sink as many enemy ships as possible, without losing Seawolf in the bargain.

This time around I sank all the Chinese warships and some of the landing force vessels. In my mind, if the Chinese had attempted to finish their landing with what was left – three landing craft and one big merchant ship – it would have been a disaster for Beijing and a U.S.-Taiwan victory.

See how shallow the water in the Taiwan Strait is?   © 2017 Killerfish Games

Still, it might have been nice to sink just one more landing craft, just to make sure.