Silent Hunter

The 1996 Silent Hunter put players in command of an American submarine in the Pacific theater of World War II, and stood among the most thorough war simulations of its time, with a detailed model of navigation, torpedo attacks and enemy patrol behavior. Players had to manually work out a target's course, speed and range using the torpedo data computer, a defining trait of the series from its very first entry. Later entries gradually shifted the series' setting: both Silent Hunter II (2001) and Silent Hunter III (2005) focused on German U-boats in the Atlantic, and with strong support from the modding community, the third game became the series' most acclaimed entry thanks to its historical precision and an atmosphere enriched by crew members with names and moods of their own, plus a dynamic career spanning the entire war.

Silent Hunter 4: Wolves of the Pacific (2007) returned to American submarines in the Pacific and offered a graphical and simulation step up from earlier entries, while Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic (2010) went back to the Atlantic but was marred at launch by technical problems and a controversial always-online requirement, which damaged its reception among part of the fanbase. Development of the series gradually passed from its original creators to Ubisoft's studios, most notably Ubisoft Romania, which was behind the later installments and tried to repair the fifth game's reputation with later patches and expansions.

Partly because of that, Silent Hunter built a reputation as one of the most respected submarine simulation series, blending painstaking realism with the tension of a chase carried out at the edge of sonar range, and it remains a reference point that later attempts at faithful submarine warfare simulation are still measured against.