ALAN’S ANCIENT WARGAME
by Hazed
Way way back in the mists of time, Alan wrote a computer game. No, I’m not talking about Federation, but a single-player wargame called Frontline. It came out on the Atari ST and then was ported to the Commodore Amiga by Fed player John Chasey (Zugger). Alan then ported it to the PC. Yes, that was a long time ago – 1990 to be precise!
In the game, the player took charge of an army fighting several decisive battles from the Second World II, such as Monte Cassino and Stalingrad. It was well-received at the time.
By today’s standards it looks incredibly crude. Computer graphics have certainly moved on, and today’s wargames such as Call of Duty and Command and Conquer are orders of magnitude more sophisticated, both in graphics and in gameplay. But for its time, Frontline was a good example of what was possible. In fact, it was the first wargame to feature decent graphics.
It was quite financially successful at the time although sales of the Amiga version in particular suffered from pirate versions being easily available.
I was involved too - I helped test the game and wrote the manual. On one memorable occasion, I rang up Alan and 'I've run out of soldiers, what do I do now?', following a series of brutal frontal attacks on Monte Cassino... I don’t think I would have made a very good general in real life!
Alan had all but forgotten he’d ever written the game, until last week when he stumbled across a webpage about it. You can take a look at the details of Alan’s Frontline game here, and see a couple of screenshots – click on the graphics to expand them.
