Geopolitique 1990

SSI published Geopolitique 1990 in 1983 for the Apple II, with a Commodore 64 version following. It is a Cold War strategy game with one seat at the table: you run the United States, the computer runs the Soviet Union, and there is no two-player option. The 1990 of the title is a near-future scenario in which superpower rivalry has flared up again.

Everything is measured through three figures - gross national product, prestige and national security. Before a game starts you pick two of them as your objectives, and you win once both reach the threshold set by the scenario, of which there are seven. The main instrument is diplomacy with minor nations, handled as a back-and-forth exchange: you can lean harder on a country to force an agreement, or ease off, while the country in question may appeal to the rival superpower for moral support and flip the situation against you. That negotiation loop was genuinely fresh in 1983; Computer Gaming World called the game not merely excellent but innovative.

Running underneath it is a world tension gauge. Push it too far and the confrontation becomes a third world war - conventional rather than nuclear in this game's model - resolved in favour of whichever side built the stronger economy and military beforehand. Combat is handled by a separate program on the same disk, so the package is effectively split into a political half and a war half.

It runs in the browser here, which removes the hardware problem but not the interface one. Input is terse and unexplained, there is no tutorial, and without the original manual your first sessions will be spent decoding abbreviations. Get past that and you find a clean abstract model of superpower politics that Balance of Power would popularise two years later.