Sub Mission

Sub Mission, published by Mindscape in 1987, is one of the strangest games ever released for the PC — not because of what happens on screen, but because of what happens on the disk. The setup: a mysterious warlord, a devoted lover of war games, holds two captives named Peter and Sigourney. He will release them on one condition — someone must beat him at his own game, fought with remote-controlled miniature submarines.

The gameplay crosses a simulator with an adventure. You pilot the subs from the keyboard, partly through typed commands, navigating flooded passages, watching your systems and above all the oxygen: with captives aboard you must surface regularly or they suffocate. The central decision is stark — send expendable robots into danger, or risk carrying the living humans? Robots are just hardware; Peter and Sigourney are not.

Which brings us to the infamous hook. The game remembered the captives' deaths. Lose them for good and the disk simply struck them out — no restart, no reloading a save. Players who wanted Peter and Sigourney back had to approach the publisher about a replacement disk. As a design experiment in permanent consequences it was decades ahead of its time; as a commercial idea it was by all accounts a disaster that sank the game at retail.

Today Sub Mission fascinates mostly as an artifact: four-color CGA graphics, and originally an audio cassette in the box carrying a spoken briefing, because sound cards barely existed when it was made. The actual play is slow and opaque, and without the manual you will flounder for a while — but few games let you feel how seriously the eighties could mean the word „defeat“.

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