North Atlantic '86 - Game Details

Game Details

There was one interesting thing missing as compared to Guadalcanal Campaign and Bomb Alley. In the World War II games, Grigsby had kept track of the number of torpedoes carried on each ship and submarine. But the need to keep track of so many other variables in North Atlantic '86 caused him to delete the counters and instead give each ship a random chance of exhausting its stock of torpedoes each time it fired. This meant that a submarine might run out of torpedoes after its first attack.

The greatest weakness of North Atlantic '86 was the ability of unarmed search and cargo aircraft to go anywhere they had the range to go, immune to enemy fighters. This allowed bases that should have been isolated to be supplied, and therefore active. Worse, search aircraft could spot enemy ships almost anywhere in the Atlantic, and locating the enemy is crucial in warfare. This led to airstrikes every twelve hours whenever ships were at sea, an unlikely tempo of operations.

In spite of these and other limitations, the game was an extraordinary achievement, given that all program code and game data were on a 140KB floppy disk, and the game executed on an Apple II with as little as 48KB of RAM. In fact, Grigsby pushed the limits of the Apple II so far that there would not have been enough memory available without using SSI's proprietary RDOS instead of Apple's conventional operating system. The players faced a number of challenging decisions, but they had a variety of potent ships and aircraft at their disposal. Although the game relied on text for most of the interaction with the players, most players found high excitement levels during the combat phase. Program execution was surprisingly fast for a BASIC program on an 8-bit 1 MHz CPU. Combat was intense, and losses on both sides were high. Happily North Atlantic '86, unlike the previous games, was fictional and stayed that way.