Silent Service

The periscope breaks the surface, in the distance the silhouette of an enemy convoy takes shape, and you hold your breath. This scene played out in the minds of thousands of Commodore 64 owners in the eighties thanks to Silent Service, one of the titles that practically defined what a submarine simulator should look like.

Behind the game stand the legendary MicroProse and the name of Sid Meier himself, the designer who later became famous for the Civilization and Pirates! series. Silent Service puts you in the role of the commander of an American submarine operating in the Pacific during World War II. Your task is to hunt down Japanese ships, close in on convoys, and at the right moment launch torpedoes to send as much tonnage to the bottom as possible.

For its time, the game offered remarkable depth. The player switches between the periscope, the map, depth and course control, and the torpedo tube, calculates bearing and range, and decides when to attack and when to dive and escape the depth charges. All of this ran even on the modest C64 hardware, which was a technical feat in itself, because the game had to handle the simulation, the controls, and a clear presentation within limited memory.

What makes Silent Service stand out is the balance between accessibility and authenticity. It was neither a dry academic simulation nor a mindless shooter. It managed to evoke a sense of tension and command responsibility while remaining playable for the ordinary home computer owner. It was precisely this combination that made it an enormous success and one of the pillars on which MicroProse built its reputation as the king of simulators.

The game's cultural significance is hard to overstate. Silent Service ranks among the founders of the genre of submarine simulators and heralded a long line of successors as well as later sequels. It came out on a whole range of period platforms and for many players was their first contact with the idea that a computer game could credibly model a real machine and a real war. From today's perspective, it's a classic that stands at the beginning of an entire tradition.

Why play: A founding submarine simulator by Sid Meier and MicroProse that laid the foundations of the genre and can still evoke the tension of the hunt beneath the surface.