Red Storm Rising

Year 1989, late evening, darkness outside the window, and I'm on the bridge of a nuclear submarine somewhere beneath the North Atlantic. EGA graphics in fifteen colors on the monitor, booming sonar from the Sound Blaster — and the feeling that World War III has truly begun. Red Storm Rising by MicroProse managed to evoke a sticky paranoia about Soviet torpedoes even back when I didn't quite know what NATO was.

The game is based on Tom Clancy's novel of the same name from 1986, a war thriller about a hypothetical Soviet attack on Western Europe. But MicroProse took only one layer from that thick book — underwater warfare in the Atlantic — and built a submarine simulator around it. The player commands an American or allied submarine, patrols, tracks Soviet ships and submarines, avoids anti-submarine forces, and completes missions within a larger military conflict. No arcade, no shortcuts.

The mechanics are serious. Working with sonar, managing depth and speed, handling torpedoes, communicating with command — everything works in layers and demands patience from the player. The pace is deliberately slow; real submarine approaches demand minutes of quiet preparation before a single torpedo is fired. You either love it, or after twenty minutes you'll reach for another game. Difficulty can be adjusted, but at higher levels the game doesn't ask if you know what you're doing — it assumes you do.

What MicroProse could do better than anyone else back then was linking simulation with narrative context. Missions didn't feel like isolated tasks, but like part of a larger conflict whose outcome depended on your decisions. The flight log after each mission added a sense of weight. Graphically, the game today obviously looks like a memory of a blueprint — but the clarity of the interface didn't disappoint; the UI was surprisingly functional for its time. What aged poorly is mainly the waiting; today's player accustomed to instant response will struggle with the pace.

Today Red Storm Rising suits best those who have patience for strategy and simulation and aren't scared by the thought of reading part of the manual before starting the game. It's a piece of Cold War tension preserved in DOS — and that tension still works. If Clancy's Cold War world ever entertained you, this is exactly the place where you can play it yourself.