I started writing today's blog post, but as often happens it morphed into something else, this time a nostalgic homage to my favorite computer game company from the 1980's: Strategic Simulations Inc (SSI).Way back in 1984 when I was a young 21 years old, I purchased one of my favorite SSI computer games: 50 Mission Crush. Back then, I had a heavily modded Atari 400 computer with extra memory (48K) and a custom keyboard. So of course I got the Atari version of the game.
50 Mission Crush bills itself as a role-playing game, with your pilot improving his skills after each successful mission, which took several to ten minutes to play. You had to survive 50 missions to successfully beat the game and go home to America. I played this game so many times I lost count. I never survived 50 missions, though I did pretty well at times from what I remember. Those were good times back then!By today's standard, the game is crude with basic graphics and lots of text with numbers. But what it lacked in graphics, it made up for it in tension and addiction for an early computer war game.
Moby Games has a nice section devoted to 50 Mission Crush. A quick Google search will also turn up abandonware sites where you can download the game (only 102k in size!), as long as you don't have Windows 7 64-bit installed.
This game was one reason I sprung for a Commodore 64K in the 80s. When I played, I remember putting the names of my friends in for all of the positions in the bomber and then saying, "oh, there goes Dave!" when the message popped up that one of my crewmen were, um, lost. I loved the old SSI PC wargames. Good times!
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