Harpoon (video game)

Did You Know?

• The game mainly focuses on combat in the GIUK Gap.
• The player commands either NATO or Soviet forces, with over 100 weapon system options.

Gameplay

Harpoon is a naval simulation grounded in real-world military data, originating from a tabletop wargame. It avoids preset battle algorithms and does not enforce balance between opposing sides. Included with the game are a user’s guide featuring an appendix on superpower politics and modern naval strategy, a tactical guide by Larry Bond, and a Tom Clancy booklet on Russian destroyers. Clancy used this simulation to test the naval engagements in Red Storm Rising, a novel he co-wrote with Bond.

Development history

The United States Navy first introduced SEATAG, a manual wargame for testing tactics, in the late 1970s. It came in both classified and unclassified forms. SEATAG then evolved into NAVTAG, a training game that used three linked microcomputers for Red, Blue, and Game Control sides. While on active duty in 1980, former naval officer and future author Larry Bond encountered this system, which eventually led him to create Harpoon. The original game saw several expansions: Harpoon BattleSet 2: North Atlantic Convoys (1989), Harpoon Battleset 3: The MED Conflict (1991), Harpoon BattleSet 4: Indian Ocean / Persian Gulf (1991), and Harpoon Designers' Series: BattleSet Enhancer (1992). A remake called Harpoon Classic was released in 1994, followed by another remake, Harpoon Classic '97, in 1997.

Reception

Sales of Harpoon surpassed 80,000 copies by 1993. In the February 1990 edition of Computer Gaming World, M. Evan Brooks, a United States military officer, gave the game five stars out of five, stating it was the most detailed simulation in the civilian marketplace and that he learned more from six hours with the game than one year at the Naval War College. In the April 1990 edition of Dragon, Patricia, Kirk and Hartley Lesser called it a true simulation with real-world data, deemed it a graphical masterpiece, and gave the PC DOS/MS-DOS version a perfect score of 5 out of 5, saying it was far more than a game. They later awarded perfect scores to the Macintosh version and, six months after that, to the Amiga version. In the May 1990 edition of Games International, Mike Siggins noted the complexity, stating it was not a game for wimps, praised the graphics and user interface, and gave both the game and graphics an 8 out of 10. In the December 1990–January 1991 edition of Info, Judith Kilbury-Cobb wrote that a preview copy of the Amiga version looked killer with more technical detail than any game had a right to. In the next issue, she found the finished product more nuanced, acknowledging overwhelming tactical and strategic data but noting unbearably sluggish performance on a basic Amiga, giving it an average rating of 3.5 out of 5 and saying it was long on realism but somewhat short on playability.