Sunday, August 14, 2011

Cover to Cover: SSI Summer 1986 Catalog (pp. 6-7)

SSI produced a lot of wargames in the 1980s, as the market-leading publisher in the genre -- enough to fill several pages of its Summer 1986 catalog, including the two we looked at yesterday.  Here are some more, from page 6!




Most of these are traditional hex-based wargames.  Mech Brigade is set in the near-future 1990s, though the "mechs" do not include Japanese-inspired giant robots of the sort now associated with the term.  Geopolitique 1990 is a political/economic/military simulation, from an era when a primitive display full of labeled rectangular boxes was no impediment to players' willingness to explore and experiment.

And the games go marching on, charging forward onto page 7:


Again, most of these are fairly traditional hex-based wargames, adapted to home computers and saving players quite a bit of setup and calculation time in the process.  We do see a few modifications in progress - Panzer Grenadier attempts a slightly 3-D perspective, for a change in presentation style, and Combat Leader features arcade action, though the screenshot appears to indicate that the "graphics" are resolutely text-based.

Next weekend, we'll start seeing some of SSI's sci-fi and fantasy games.  And, yes, still more wargames.

1 comment:

  1. Battlegroup (pg 6) presented the western front in WWII while sister game, Kampfgruppe (pg 4), presented the war with Russia in the east.

    Computer Bismarck (pg 6) and Computer Ambush (pg 4) were SSI's first published games. The catalog's claim that the new edition of Computer Ambush was "40x faster than before" was no joke. The original, text-only, first edition for Apple computers could take three hours to process one game turn.

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