Theatre Europe is a game for the Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, MSX and ZX Spectrum home computers. It casts the player as either NATO or the countries of the Warsaw Pact. The goal is to win the war against the other faction without destroying the world in nuclear war. The warpower of the Warsaw Pact side is overwhelming, so that winning with this side is quite easy. Playing the NATO side winning is only possible by halting the Warsaw Pact forces for a reasonable time. Entering the territory of the Warsaw Pact will cause the game to end with a global nuclear war and a score of 0%
Apart from the possibility of using nuclear weapons, the game also includes chemical and conventional weapons.
One unusual aspect of the game is that in order to initiate a nuclear attack, the player had to call a special United Kingdom telephone number to hear the launch code. (Versions of the game localized for the United States directed the player to a U.S. telephone number.) The telephone number connected the player to a recorded message, which started with the sound of air raid sirens and dramatically built up through various sounds of war to a huge explosion, followed by the sound of a crying baby. As this faded out, a voice stated, "If this is really what you want... the code is 'Midnight Sun'". (This was also printed somewhat obscurely in the manual.)
In contrast to the game's subject matter of war, a portion of the title music is an homage to John Lennon's 1969 song, "Give Peace a Chance."
Read more about Theatre Europe: Reception
Famous quotes containing the words theatre and/or europe:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)