It’s an idea that the creators are open to and have plenty of ideas. I asked Bond whether there were plans for a new computer game based on the series. It is still a tabletop game which is what naval training institutions will like about it. Harpoon V promises to be a faithful continuation of the series, with many refinements over the earlier versions. It is a simulation which is also a game, rather than a game which pretends to be simulation. Another factor which Persian Incursion amply demonstrates is that Harpoon is not ‘balanced’ in the way that most real-time-strategy (RTS) games are. It was played by various government departments.
Persian Incursion, released in 2010, simulates an Israeli air strike on the Natanz nuclear site in Iran. This translates across all of Bond’s wargames, not just naval scenarios. They need to understand how it works under the hood. In the military setting, you want the players to understand why they missed and how they can increase the chances of success when they fire again. In a computer game if you miss a target, you move on. Bond told me that the ‘black box’ of computer game engines dulled the training experience. This gives the players time to think, which it turns out is important to navies. The computer version was real time, as a single player might expect, but the table-top versions are turn-based. But although multiple navies have used the computer game, it has not proven as popular as the underlying miniatures game, such as the latest Harpoon V. When I told people that I was writing an article more than one seasoned sailor told me that playing Harpoon was what got them into the Navy. Harpoon was a classic computer game of the 1990s. Harpoon V (right) Larry Bond Why Navies Use Harpoon The Computer game (center) was released in 1989.
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Consequently accuracy was, to the extent possible, maintained.Ĭovers of Harpoon series games. Smoke and mirrors could be used to simplify the mechanics, but each missile needed to be modeled separately to meet the Harpoon standards of realism. A regiment of Backfires all launching their missiles was still enough to strain the 1990s computer hardware though. This was at a time when even the latest home computers, 286s, were struggling to run the complex models involved in a simulation like Harpoon. Bond was already working on a more complete version however, which was released the next year simply as Harpoon.
It was a great game, but computer hardware of the time meant that it had to be limited to submarine warfare. It was released on the Commodore 64 in 1988. In the end Sid Meier, the creator of Civilization, made the first Harpoon-based computer game. With the success of Red Storm Rising, computer game companies queued up to create a digital version. To start with, the Soviets had to be winning in the first part of the book, so Clancy had to draw on his strategic genius to think up plot twists to keep the story on track. But Red Storm Rising could not be a literal narration of the wargames.
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