#012: Warfish

Release Date: February 2, 1973

Platform: Mainframe

Genre: Strategy

Developer(s): Randy Witt

Publisher(s):

Well, I'm back from my holiday, so it's time for another article. Here, we have something a bit (when I say "a bit," I mean a lot) more interesting. Warfish presents a game concept we've only seen on the Magnavox Odyssey thus far in video game history: submarine warfare. Later in the decade, there'll be a few noteworthy naval warfare games involving submarines, such as Midway's Sea Wolf and Gremlin's Depth Charge, but here in 1973, the concept is still fresh.

Another point of interest for Warfish is that it may very well be the first ever game based on a book. The 1958 book War Fish is the source of inspiration for this game, a book telling the firsthand account of submarine commander George Grider's wartime career. He was commander of the USS Flasher, and was on duty during World War II.

Warfish appears in the sequel to one of the most oft-referenced books on my blog, David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games. More BASIC Computer Games, published in 1979, includes a new stack of games and programs from across the 1970s, generally a bit more varied and complex than the games in the first book. We'll be seeing this book a few more times throughout 1973, and, like its predecessor, is freely available to read at atariarchives.org. 

I'm sad to say that the authorship of this game is, for the most part, another standard case for this time period. Our author today is Randy Witt (sometimes spelled "Wit".) This is his only game, and, once again, there are several people sharing that name, with no immediate indication of which Randy Witt was the author of Warfish. Fortunately, we have some clues in the game's Sol-20 source code (found here), including the date on which Warfish's development was completed. The code also tells us where Randy Witt was from: Janesville, Minnesota. From here I was able to do some sleuthing, and determined that the Randy Witt who authored Warfish is a Randy Robert Witt from Iowa. The little else I could find on him suggests that he stayed in computing in some form after programming Warfish. Coincidentally, there are also a couple of other Randy Witts who served in the military.

The only information we have on Warfish outside of the source code.

Unlike the preceding book, there is no set of Vintage BASIC games for More BASIC Computer Games, so different means are required to access Warfish. It had a couple of microcomputer ports, including to the Sol-20 and TRS-80. A DOS port of the game has been uploaded to the Internet Archive - it's one of the ports that has a "modern" and "classic" version of the game, of which the "classic" version is exactly the same as the game listed in the book, so that's what I'll be going with today. 

I had higher hopes for this game compared to the last one (Slots), which was not hard, mind you. It seemed from reading the game description that it might have been something akin to a text-based version of Midway's Sea Wolf, and I love Sea Wolf.

So, is Warfish as I hoped? Well... kind of. The gameplay loop is a fairly rudimentary one - you use your sub's periscope to search out a target, and then fire torpedoes at it until it sinks. Rinse and repeat until you run out of torpedoes, or get blown up by your enemies. The only intrusion into the basic loop is if a ship is attacking you, where you can dive to avoid it (or risk fighting back.) The main aim of the game is to sink as many ships as possible, with the game giving you a score according to the gross tonnage of the ships you destroyed. Except for avoiding enemy ships, this is a fairly similar gameplay loop to Sea Wolf.

How strong is your desire for rules?

Warfish, as is standard, first asks if you want the instructions. You get the rundown of how the game works, and also gives you a little bit of a military history lesson by listing the names of real US submarines. It's giving you a bit of inspiration, as your first task is to name your sub. I went with one of the real names, Thresher. The submarine that George Grider commandeered, USS Flasher, is also listed.

Personally, I have a deep-seated desire to read the instructions of games I've not played before.

The inputs for your gameplay choices reflect how many text-based games handle inputs going forward. Each command is an entire word - to use the periscope, you actually type in "PERISCOPE," and so on. I think it's neat that Warfish does this, as it adds to the immersion of the game. What's even neater, however, is that you don't actually have to type in the full word! The first letter of each command is accepted by the game, too.

There are various types of ships you'll encounter during a round of Warfish. Most, like transports, tankers and aircraft carriers, don't fight back, and sinking them is just a matter of firing torpedoes until enough hit to sink them. According to the description in More BASIC Computer Games, whether a torpedo hits or not is determined at random.

How an encounter with a generic ship typically goes.

When it comes to attacking enemy ships, things are a little different. It's still random, but there's a bit more choice available to the player. You can dive to try avoid the ship, or you can take a risk and fire retaliatory torpedoes. I tried both in my playthrough, and came out unscathed. The code appears to suggest two ways your sub can be destroyed, either by depth charges, or gunfire.

An encounter with a hostile vessel.

It took a while for a hostile ship to appear in my first go around. I was mostly just taking potshots at whatever crossed my path up until I encountered a destroyer escort, then an actual destroyer. I can imagine in my head that they must've got really sick of me sinking all their other ships, and decided to come after me with all they had. I evaded the escort, but the destroyer hung around after I dived to avoid it. I decided that, if I wouldn't go away on its own, that I'd make it go away. I only had two torpedoes left at this point, so I chose to throw a hail Mary and see what would happen.

That's what you get, destroyer!

Fortunately, I was successful in sinking the destroyer. I think I got rather lucky here, as in my testing after this run, I was almost always gunned down when I tried to fire back. Never ran into the depth charges, however.

And with that, my first round of Warfish came to an end. I sunk 7 vessels, with a gross tonnage of 59,300. This is on the lower end of the scores I ended up getting on follow-up playthroughs.

Before I go onto the score, I have an opportunity to talk about high scores for a change! For arcade games and the like that keep track of high scores, I'll be putting up my best effort from my playing time for you all to compete against. For Warfish, I played a few more rounds, and managed a best of 13 ships, with a tonnage of 77,370. If you have a go at this one, let me know what your best was in the comments.

Now we can do the scores.

Time Played: Rough estimate of 15 minutes. A single playthrough takes between 1 - 3 minutes.

Difficulty: 1/10 (Very Easy)

It's hard to quantify the difficulty of Warfish, as the outcomes of most actions are random. As long as you're not feeling especially risky, it's incredibly easy to complete a playthrough.

Gameplay: 4/20

Warfish occupies a similar space to something like Dartmouth Championship Football. Both present several strategic options, but suffer from the illusion of choice, as outcomes are determined randomly. I think Warfish is a little better, thanks to its faster pace and simple attempts at immersion.

Controls: 7/10

Even if not immediately obvious, the ability to input the first letter of each command is an excellent addition to help the fast-paced nature of the game.

Visual: 4/10

There's a small typo in the instructions (I'll let you figure out where), and some of the formatting is a little wonky when diving.

Functionality: 5/5

No noticeable performance issues.

Accessibility: 3/5

While Warfish does require less reading, and is more action-oriented than previous text games, it's still a text game.

Fun Factor: 5/20

High scores make everything that little bit more replayable for me. Although, the random nature of the game severely impacts the interest in wanting to keep playing, as there's not really any skill required. Still, the speed of the game does make it somewhat enjoyable.

In total, Warfish earns a 28/70, which is 40% exactly, meaning it just scrapes into the bottom of the D-tier. A much better showing than Slots, and gives me a bit of hope that 1973's games will continue to improve from here.

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#011: Slots

Release Date: January 29, 1973

Platform: Mainframe

Genre: Casino/Gambling

Developer(s): Fred Mirabelle, Bob Harper

Publisher(s): N/A

So begins 1973, with a game that I won't be spending too much time on, as there's not much game to talk about.

Slots is, as the name implies, a slot machine game - the good ol' One-Armed Bandit. It's the first of many games from this year to feature in David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games series of books.

A very... plain introductory page.

However, simple as the game may be, the timeline for it is not. While MobyGames states its release date to be January 29, 1973, it also states that this game is not the same slot machine game to feature in the original Ahl book, but instead features in the book's microcomputer re-release from 1978. Hmm.

So, where does the January 1973 date come from, then? Fortunately, there's a simple answer for this. The program authors, Bob Harper and Fred Mirabelle left a line in the program's code, stating their authorship, and date of creation as January 29, 1973. I'm very appreciative of this.

The line of code in question is the fourth line, left column.

As for the authors, there is scant information on them. I couldn't find anything on Fred Mirabelle, and Bob Harper... well... this Bob Harper is not to be confused with the Bob Harper who was a trainer on the US version of The Biggest Loser... despite MobyGames treating them as the same person. If it were the case, he must have been a coding genius, as he would've been seven years old when he made this game. What wasted potential.

On the serious side, there's actually a few other Bob (or Robert) Harpers floating around, but none that I can definitively say is the Bob Harper that created this game. There's a computer scientist Bob Harper, who is naturally a likely candidate, but I found nothing to suggest he was the programmer of this game. Once again, the authors will remain a mystery. The one-game-wonders strike again...

The game itself is a very basic (ha) interpretation of a casino slot machine. There's no graphical representation of the slot machine - everything is represented in text. The "machine" itself only has a few different symbols for its reels, six, at my last count. No stereotypical 7s for the jackpot, either, just fruit, bells and bars. Suddenly, I'm reminded of Pac-Man. No idea why.

Your digital "One-Armed Bandit."

You have the choice of betting between $1 and $100 dollars, and, according to the book's description, the odds are in your favour. The book goes into a detailed description of how real slot machine odds work, before stating that the game has an 11% bias towards the player; you win $111 for every $100 you put in. If only the real ones were like that.

My first play of Slots didn't last long. Less than thirty seconds, in fact. I placed my first bet, and then tried to put in another bet when it asked my if I wanted to go again, which ended my game. Turns out you have to input a 'Y' when it asks you this to continue. I think we're getting to the point where this kind of input is becoming unnecessary and intrusive. I could just be allowed to input another bet to continue, or input a zero if I wanted to leave.

I've been kicked out of H&M Casino...

Having learnt this, I tried again, and played for a couple minutes to see what would happen. Here is when I noticed a neat little easter egg: the game introduces itself as "H&M Casino," a reference to the game's authors. As for the game itself, there were the typical swings you get from a glorified RNG simulator, but I ended up finishing with over $3500 of winnings, thanks to hitting the jackpot (called "TOP DOLLAR" by the game) twice. I decided this was enough, and that I didn't need to see anymore. 

Jackpot. If only it were this easy.

Unfortunately, I had to go around again, as I couldn't use that footage for YouTube, as I didn't realise my laptop microphone was on, meaning that there was white noise throughout the recording. I did another playthrough once I fixed this issue, going until I hit the jackpot, which took 3 minutes exactly. Humourously, this doubled my overall playtime with Slots.

I don't have anything more to say here, so let's get into the scores, shall we?

Time Played: 6 minutes

Difficulty: 0/10 (RNG Sim)

Gameplay: 0/20

I think it was pretty clear from the outset that this was getting a zero. There is no gameplay - just another glorified RNG simulator.

Controls: 4/10

I'm knocking this down a point from the standard 5/10 for the annoyance of having to press Y every time I want to bet again. It's also what I say every time I have to press said button.

Visual: 4/10

Also knocking down the visuals score for the sheer plain-ness of the game. Considering how text-based games are now trying to be more creative from a visual standpoint, Slots stands out as being particularly unimaginative.

Functionality: 5/5

Full marks here, as there are no functional issues. Very little can go wrong.

Accessibility: 3/5

A lot of people don't like gambling, and this is an old, text-based, digital version of gambling, so it doesn't really seem all that appealing.

Fun Factor: 0/20

Yeah. What did you expect?

Overall, Slots is currently tied with Galaxy Game as the worst game I've reviewed on the blog thus far, with a measly score of 16/70. However, as this has a Gameplay score of zero, it will sit at the very bottom of the F-tier as the worst game I've played. I didn't really expect much else out of a text-based slot machine simulator. There's not even the interest of a graphical display, watching the reels spin and seeing what symbols they land on. It's just... sad.

Not a good start for 1973... at least this was a nice, easy way for me to get back into the swing of things. Still enjoy it as much as I did before the unplanned 2-month break, so that's good. Also good is that 1973 is very quickly going to get a whole lot more interesting.

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Update: 1973 Roadmap

Hi all,

Sorry for being gone for a while. Life's been very busy recently. I had the family visit, got sick, then started a second job, quit said job, and then got another second job which has been flat out since. I'm also going back to my home state next week for a family event, which involves two full days of driving to get there.

All this, along with having problems with the PLATO article, kind of sucked all my energy and motivation out of working on the blog for a while. I've had a mind to get back to it, but have only had the time and motivation to slowly put together the list for 1973 over the past week or so.

The good news is, that my 1973 coverage is officially starting! However, there will be some slight changes to how I run things. Number one, is that I'll be dumping the one-article-per-week commitment I set out previously. Work is currently busy and unpredictable, and I have a busy-enough social life to suck all my introvert batteries dry most days, meaning my time is limited to work on the blog. Articles will just come out whenever they're ready for now.

As for the promised PLATO overview article... I still intend to finish it, but it won't be the next thing to come out, as it's a massive project, even compared to the Odyssey project. PLATO has an overly-messily-documented development history, and I have stacks of games to play and record. There aren't any new systems to cover for the entirety of 1973, so I'll be working on it periodically with the aim to have it complete by the conclusion of my 1973 coverage - which shouldn't be too hard to do, since we'll be in 1973 for quite a while.

1973 is, as I've determined from my research and planning, the first real year of video games. What I mean by that is, that the scope of video games expands exponentially in 1973, both in terms of development complexity and popularity. The number of countries producing games is increasing, the scale of the arcade industry is increasing, and the sheer number of games being developed increases dramatically. For reference, 1971 and 1972 had 10 games between them that I covered. 1973, on the other hand, has at least sixty-four games (hah, funny number...) I'll be covering - potentially a few more. These games (on the computer end of things especially) are expanding in complexity, and new genres are being invented, such as adventure games.

A significant contributor to this expansion is the initial release of David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games book of type-in programs. I've been relying on this book (and its 1978 update) quite a lot already, but many of the games from 1973 find their origins in this book. The People's Computer Company newsletters and magazines also contribute significantly to the spread of video games, as they often feature several innovative games. Expect to see these two resources appear frequently throughout the year. All are free to view on the Internet Archive, if you're keen to follow along with me.

Righto, that's all from me for now. Expect to see the first game of 1973 soon!

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