Eastern Front (video Game) - Development and Versions

Development and Versions

Crawford, who worked at Atari at the time, developed Eastern Front during his own time for nine months. In a 1987 interview, he estimated he had worked a total of 800 hours on Eastern Front.

Crawford approached Atari about selling the game, but the company felt that wargames would not sell on the 8-bits. Instead he turned to the Atari Program Exchange (APX), a mail-order operation that distributed 3rd party applications. Eastern Front became an APX best-seller, selling over 60,000 copies ($40,000 in royalties). The manager of APX noted that Eastern Front paid their bills. Crawford also released the source code to the game on APX, at a higher price. He later expressed his surprise that while sales of the source code did seem to be strong, no 3rd-party games were ever released that were based on it. This code is now available on the internet, allowing it to be examined, although only within the Atari Assembler Editor, perhaps in an emulator.

The game was so successful that Atari asked Crawford to do a conversion to cartridge. Crawford took the time to make a new version, improving many aspects of the game. To improve the gameplay he revamped the AI code, and eliminated the ability to "fast forward" the game and avoid combat. Five "difficulty levels" were added, the "learner" mode with a single German unit in order to teach the user how to use the controls, and each level above that adding more units up to "advanced", which was identical to the original game. In the highest level, "expert", air force corps (Fliegercorp) were added, and the units could be placed in one of several "modes"; normal, assault, defend and move. In "expert" the user could also choose to start in either 1941 with the standard opening, or 1942, with fully developed lines deep within Russia. The new version also added the ability to save and restore games, colored cities to indicate ownership, and added city names to the in-game map (which were previously visible only in the manual). The conversion from APX to official Atari product was fairly rare, although Caverns of Mars and Dandy underwent similar conversions for the same reasons.

Crawford would go on to use many of the ideas pioneered in Eastern Front to produce Legionnaire for Avalon Hill in 1982. Legionnaire used the same map engine to simulate the Roman legions fighting the barbarians, but modified the engine to move units in real-time. This made the game much more difficult to outthink than Eastern Front, as the human user was forced to find the enemy units on the map, plan strategy, and move their units at the same time.