Defend the Alamo

When you insert the "Defend the Alamo" diskette into your computer, you're in for something that doesn't even pretend to be a game in the modern sense. It's more like a spreadsheet with a mocking sense of humor, allowing you to play armchair general in text form. 1994, MS-DOS, and nobody knows who made it — all signs that we're dealing with a piece from which maybe ten copies were ever born.

It's a simulation of defending the Alamo during the Texas Revolution in 1836. You assign soldiers to various positions, boost supplies, make tactical decisions. A screen covered in letters and numbers tells you how things are going. The goal is simple — defend the fortress against Mexican forces without, preferably, destroying your own troops in the process. Historical accuracy is something this game boasts of minimally; it looks more like a school project thrown together at the last minute.

Gameplay happens turn by turn. You enter commands, press a button (or rather type the appropriate characters) and the game tells you what happened. There's not much graphics, there's no sound as you know it from games — you mostly hear the PC speaker beeping. The mechanics are simple to the point of naivety, but it's precisely in that simplicity where a strange appeal lies. You have to think, you have to remember troop counts and positions. It's not a game of reflexes, it's a game of brains, and in an era when Doom was already flying around on disks, that sounds almost like a provocation.

"Defend the Alamo" is a typical product of a time when everyone thought they could program a game over a weekend. In the nineties that was normal — amid megahits and professional productions, plenty of such amateur attempts mixed in. Sometimes something interesting came out of them, sometimes just boring exercises. Nobody's going to try this game today, because expectations are completely different, but as a historical curiosity it can be understood — it's proof of an era when a computer meant access to a whole new world, and everyone briefly believed that if you combined a poet with a programmer, you'd get a designer.

If you're into archaic forms of simulation that you can handle in any browser, and you don't mind thinking while you play, here it is. Expect simple numbers on a black background though, with no graphical flourishes, no dramatic music. It's pure strategy, bare and unadorned. Paradoxically, that's its strength — when it all comes together just right, you feel like a commander, not a player in a menu.