M1 Tank Platoon

The Good
The gameplay of M1 Tank Platoon is fabulous. Its gameplay was innovative and complex for the year it was released, and it still holds up well today some 12 years later. This was one of the very first PC games I ever bought after buying my first IBM clone (a 25MHz 486) in 1992. Over the past 10 years, I've upgraded my computer twice, moving to a 200Mhz Pentium Pro in 1996, and then a 1GHz Athlon in 2000. And during that time, M1 Tank Platoon has always had a permanent place on my hard drive. This is a distinction it shares with only a few other games: Doom II, Civ2, and System Shock. It's just that good.

Each combat zone had a "Blue Base" and a "Red Base." The Blue Base was your field HQ. The Red Base was the enemy field HQ. Your mission could either be offensive, defensive, or neutral. Offensive missions required you to capture the enemy base, defensive missions required you to defend your own base, and neutral missions could go either way (the enemy was advancing on your base, so you could either advance on his base or defend your own). There were also occasional escort missions where you would rendezvous with halftracks and escort them to the edge of the map where they would retreat.

One of the interesting things about the game was that your mission objectives were based on how well you did in the previous missions. If you successfully achieved the mission objectives for one mission, your next mission would place you firmly on the offensive. If, on the other hand, you failed to achieve your objectives in one mission, your next mission would find you on the defensive. And as you built up a string of successful (or unsuccessful) missions, the missions would get tougher and tougher.

Each successful mission in a row would be tougher than the last. There would be more enemies defending your target objective, and they would have better equipment than previous defenders in earlier missions. This was meant to simulate the fact that you were getting closer and closer to the heart of the enemy's territory. You'd polished off their weak outlying defenses in the early missions, you'd cut through stronger defenses in the middle missions as you neared their stronghold, and now you were facing their elite forces as they pitched an all-out effort to defend their final positions. After about ten consecutive successful missions, you would be declared the winner of a "campaign" and be hailed as a hero by a cheering crowd. The war would still be going on around you, and you would have more campaigns to fight over your 99-game career, but for now you could relax secure in the knowledge that you had achieved a lasting victory in your particular theater of war.

Similarly, a string of unsuccessful missions would also get tougher as they mounted up. One failed mission would be a minor setback, resulting in the enemy sending out a small, weak exploratory force to harry you and test your resolve. If you continued to fail at your missions, the enemy, sensing a weakness in your defensive emplacements, would grow bolder and would begin flinging more powerful units at you in increasing numbers, all in an effort to polish you off once and for all. After about eight or ten consecutive failed missions, you would "lose" a campaign and be recalled for desk duty.

This variable mission and variable toughness aspect of the game, combined with the reasonably broad variety of mission types available, gave M1 Tank Platoon a high replay value.

Another interesting facet of the game was that you could control almost any of your units from a 1st person perspective (helicopters and infantry were immune to such direct control, as I recall, but everything else was fair game). I would frequently let the AI do all the combat duty for my four M1 tanks while I drove and fought from a mobile rocket launcher or a mobile artillery unit using the 1st-person view.

This 1st-person view is, for some reason, never remarked upon. When people think of the progenitors of the First Person Shooter genre, they think of Doom, and Wolfenstein 3-D, and the Ultima Underworld series. But M1 Tank Platoon featured innovations which were wildly ahead of their time and which, while we now take them for granted, wouldn't be seen in other games for years:

• The landscape was fully 3-D. You drove up and down and around hills, around barns, past trees and windmills, etc. It wasn't hi-res, but it was 3-D.
• The 1st-person view, while common in today's games, was generally considered computationally too taxing for the computers of the late 1980s. M1 Tank Platoon's true 1st-person view was therefore fairly revolutionary for the time.
• The opponents were 3-D models constructed of polygons, something that wouldn't be seen again until Descent, and wouldn't be common until the era of Quake.
• You could view any of your units from a 3rd-person perspective, complete with a fully rotatable camera that could be set to view your units from any angle.

Pretty amazing for a game that predates Doom by four years, predates Descent by five years, and was designed to be played on an 8MHz 286 computer with 384 kilobytes of RAM.

The Bad
The graphics are a tad monotonous, even for the year the game was released. Green green green green green, everywhere you look.

The Bottom Line
A great tank combat simulation, well deserving of the "classic" designation.