Back in the earlier days of the British microcomputer boom, when we were still figuring out what computer games could be, Psion’s Flight Simulation was a huge hit on the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum. Among the earliest adopters of the technology, a technical simulation with lots of gauges, in which landing your plane was an extremely difficult exercise, could be the most popular game around. As the reach of computers and games expanded in the middle of the decade, though, the top of the UK charts became a place reserved for slightly less complex pleasures. It took something as singular and space-fantasy-based as Elite to break through. At least, until one American company managed to buck that trend with something more down to earth.

MicroProse was formed in 1982 by two employees of technology company General Instruments, based in Maryland. ‘Wild Bill’ Stealey was a gregarious former US Air Force pilot who had “Fighter Pilot Supreme” printed on his business cards. Sid Meier was a rather more modest introvert with a burgeoning hobby writing games for the Atari 800 computer. Stealey had recently bought one of those machines too, and when the two met at a conference in Las Vegas they bonded over that and playing Atari’s Red Baron arcade game, loosely discussing plans to start up a company making games. Months later, they turned those plans into reality.

  • Red Baron (Atari, 1981, Arcade)
  • Red Baron (Atari, 1981, Arcade)

Part of their Vegas discussion was Meier saying that he could make a much better version of Red Baron, and many of their earlier games were likewise based on flying planes. With the combination of Meier’s programming and design abilities and Stealey’s business sense and taste for promotion, MicroProse grew fast. Focusing on Atari computers meant their initial UK impact was smaller though – Hellcat Ace reached #1 in the UK Atari chart in April 1983 but never appeared on the combined formats chart. 

Once MicroProse started promoting Commodore 64 ports more too, and signed a deal with the recently formed British publisher U.S. Gold, they got more traction here. Solo Flight made it to #9 in a combined formats chart in June 1984, and Spitfire Ace to #13 that November. There was only so far that went though; F-15 Strike Eagle, a complex simulation which was still #2 in the US computer charts a year after release, fared no better than their previous games in the UK chart, reaching #19 in January 1985. 

  • F-15 Strike Eagle (MicroProse, 1984/1985, Commodore 64)
  • F-15 Strike Eagle (MicroProse, 1984/1985, Commodore 64)

By that point, Meier felt he had done everything he could with flight sims, regardless of Stealey’s appetite for more, and was happy to take on something different. They would stay within the world of detailed military simulations for now, with Bill Stealey telling one magazine that “I’m not interested in the sort of guy who just wants a short thrill. If you want to spend £6 on an arcade game that you’re going to play for an hour, I don’t want you buying my software.” This time, though, the vehicle was to be a submarine. 

Sid Meier took inspiration from Richard O’Kane’s World War II submarine history Clear the Bridge! (perhaps he also took a mental note of that exclamation mark) and from the chance to use a new technical trick he’d invented, to zoom in and out of areas within a wider playing field. He also saw the potential in the asymmetric tactics of submarines against destroyers, with the sub moving fast and turning slow, and the ship the opposite. This, he saw, could make for some interesting decisions for the player. 

In making the resultant game, Silent Service, Meier and MicroProse made a couple of changes to how they had previously worked. Helpfully for the UK, he designed it first and foremost for the Commodore 64. MicroProse also hired an artist, Michael Haire. Sid Meier wrote in his memoir that he didn’t see the need for that change, until seeing what Haire did with Silent Service’s central menu screen, a visual representation of the submarine’s various functions. At which point he compared it to his own efforts at the same, saw something “better in basically every possible way a work of art could be better” and thought “oh, I guess we did need a real artist”.

They were also taking increasingly long over their games. Sid Meier estimates that development for Silent Service took six to eight months, a significant difference from the three month turnaround that was then common for Japanese arcade games and British home computer games alike. As an interview with Bill Stealey in Commodore User the previous year noted, MicroProse “launches fewer games than European software houses and takes longer over them”. The same piece has the line “to describe Wild Bill Stealey as a brash American has got to be the understatement of the century” and mentions “Sid Mayer is the programming brains”, his name not yet being spelled out on the front cover of each of his games.

The extra time allowed MicroProse to put a lot into Silent Service. It is in some ways the game that Beach-Head had gestured towards being a couple of years earlier, with its linear set of different mini-games. Silent Service pulls off a much less linear version. You can move your US submarine around a map of the Pacific and zoom in to specific confrontations as you choose, scoping out ships and figuring out when best to shoot your torpedoes and get back away. You can also surface and fire guns from your deck at ships, a less realistic inclusion which Bill Stealey insisted on because he thought the game was otherwise too slow. He would refer to “deck gun” as short hand for the need to put something exciting in MicroProse games long afterwards.

At least, you can do all those things if you can pass the ship-spotting test and pick the right Japanese destroyer from a multiple choice set of presented designs, by consulting the game’s manual. If you can’t manage that, you get training runs in a fixed location only. Describing this test, Mike Pattenden in Commodore User wrote that “It’s a bit of a pointless exercise and an irritant to getting stuck in”. Whether that was genuine or feigned confusion, the test is obviously there as a means of copy protection, and quite a clever one. It gives pirates a sort of demo version of the game for a taste, and it also gives everyone else a reminder to actually read the manual.

“The instruction booklet is a work of art” said Zzap! 64, and it’s also an essential, because there are a lot of different keys and steps involved in playing. Nonetheless, Meier made an effort to keep it from getting too convoluted. When Idle Thumbs later asked him what set his simulations apart from others, he said that it was finding the fun. When it comes to firing torpedoes, for instance, the calculations of how to get them to the moving target you aim at is all handled for you by the game. You still have to consider the ship might change course, but you don’t have to do any geometry. The lovely graphic menu screen is part of the same philosophy.

Those increasingly thick manuals had also been a problem for MicroProse in the UK, as another magazine profile made clear. “Most major high street chains want a single or double cassette case, into which you can only squeeze the most basic manual. This compares badly with the American A5 size versions with comprehensive manuals of around 50 pages!”. MicroProse would soon be selling their games here in big card boxes to address that one. The same piece shows some hints at where their ambitions would go as well, with Stealey saying that “U.S. Gold have been doing a great job for us, but we feel that with a little more effort we could make a much bigger impact”.

Silent Service made a reasonably-sized impact on British critics. Grasping for comparisons, Computer & Video Games went with calling it “an underwater flight sim” and concluded that it was “an excellent wargame for those who place realism and tactics above thrills and firepower”. Likewise Lee Paddon in Your Computer wrote that “it is not a game for zap freaks but one to which the more thoughtful player will return to time and again”. 

Zzap 64! found that “the simulation has been extremely well thought out and does not appear to be flawed in any considerable respect”. Their reviewer finished, though, on a point of uncertainty. “The main question must be how much will a submarine simulation capture people’s imaginations, regardless of how well it has been implemented? I cannot help but feel that the game will have a somewhat limited appeal”.

As it turned out, it had enough appeal to become easily MicroProse’s biggest hit in the UK to date and to reach the top of the UK charts, climbing above World Cup Carnival even as the World Cup was still going on. Perhaps some of that was accumulated response to their previous strong games, but some of it was surely down to the novelty of the idea. Plus a World War II setting rarely seems a bad idea here, and the recent Falklands War perhaps meant submarine warfare was fairly fresh in the mind of some British players, even if reviews weren’t so crass as to mention that.

Soon after, MicroProse made good on their hints. Solo Flight II, a #18 hit less than a month after Silent Service, was the last MicroProse game published here by U.S. Gold, and Microprose became the first of the publisher’s American clients to leave. From there, MicroProse would fly solo. They expanded and brought on more like-minded simulation designers, some of them British, and I’ll meet some of their games in a few years. I’ll eventually get to do some more Sid Meier games too, and ones with his name on the front of their big boxes.

Gallup combined formats cart for week ending 07 June 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

Top of the charts for week ending 07 June 1986

UK games: Silent Service (Microprose/U.S. Gold, Commodore 64)

Japan games: Super Mario Bros. 2 (Nintendo, Famicom)

UK films: The Jewel of the Nile

UK singles: Doctor & the Medics – Spirit in the Sky

UK albums: Queen – A Kind of Magic

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