Theatre Europe

Theatre Europe arrived on the Commodore 64 in 1985 under the Datasoft label and remains one of the strangest war games of the decade. It simulates a third world war in Europe — NATO against the Warsaw Pact, a front running across Germany — and is built so as to sour the very victory it puts on the menu.

Mechanically it is a turn-based strategy game on a map of Europe divided into sectors. You choose a side and each turn decide where to push with ground forces, where to send aircraft — bombing runs, fights for air superiority, reconnaissance — and whether to reach for chemical weapons. Air strikes can be played out as a short arcade interlude or left to the computer while you stay with the command map.

Its fame rests on the nuclear option. It sits there from the start, but you cannot simply take it. The game demanded an authorisation code, and the only way to obtain it was to ring a telephone number supplied with the game. The recording that answered played the sounds of war, sirens, screaming and crying children, and ended in a nuclear detonation. Only then came the password. That inconvenience was entirely deliberate, and it is the strongest idea in the whole title.

The consequence lands as intended. Once one side goes nuclear the other answers, escalation takes moments, and the session ends on a screen making it plain that nobody won. As a game, meanwhile, Theatre Europe is ordinary: the controls are stiff, the opposition plays simply, and finding your way around without the manual is hard work.

It is worth trying precisely for the way it turns its own rules against the urge to win at any cost — a rare thing among strategy games of the period. It runs directly in the browser on oldgame.cz.