From the first, Steel Panthers had an active fan-base which developed new scenarios and posted them online to share with other fans. One of these super-fans was David Heath.
After founding The Gamers Network, an online game review site, in 1998, Heath went on to play-test some games for SSI as well. He also made friends with Joel Billings, the founder of SSI, and Gary Grigsby. Wanting to do more in the gaming world and “loving Steal Panthers”. Heath had several conversations with Billings and Grigsby, finally convinced them to give him the source code for Steel Panthers to develop “a fan base edition of the Steel Panthers Series”.
Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles (SPII:MB) was released in November 1996, just one year and two months after the release of the original Steel Panthers (now referred to as Steel Panthers I or SPI). Grigsby had two main goals while developing the new game; one was to improve the animation and the other was to let the players simulate most of the armed conflicts, both major and minor, historical or hypothetical, throughout the world, from 1950 to 1999.
SPII:MB was more than just a reskin of the first game. Grigsby retained the game engine of the original, but the database was completely overhauled with a thousand modern units from 40 different countries, and non-state actors, all modeled in great detail and having characteristics unique to each time period and nationality. For example, helicopters, both scout and attack were added to the weapons inventory and were placed under the players’ direct control.
Airplanes were still in a support mode, but were now equipped with ordinance like precision-guided weapons, napalm, and/or cluster-bombs. Ground forces were kitted out with an assortment of heat-seeking and radar-guided Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs) to counter the air threat, and so on.
Wars and soldiers are similar across time and space. So, it is also that war games are similar across time and space. Often the best war games are not the most innovative, but rather present the familiar elements of simulated war in a way which is compelling and engaging. The ones that are both familiar and gripping give us, the players, those rare war games which are both easy to play and understand, but hard to master. The Steel Panthers games fit right in that hard-to-find sweet spot.
Steel Panthers started development in May 1994 and was released in September 1995. The game was designed and programmed by Gray Grigsby and Keith Brors and were produced and marketed by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI).
Intellectual property (IP), licensing and copyright laws are complex and confusing, especially when it comes to properties that were created under contract, or created by one party for a second party, or developed by multiple entities. Further, the video game industry was like the Wild West in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with companies starting up, closing, buying and selling other companies, and also trading, assigning and purchasing IPs at a furious rate. All of which begs the question of how did the IP that was X-COM get from MicroProse in 2001 to Firaxis Games?
MicroProse and Mythos stopped working together, but MicroProse ended up with the X-COM license. Dave Ellis was assigned as chief game developer for MicroProse’s X-COM games. Ellis was the company’s in-house guru on the franchise, having worked in quality assurance and also, he had written strategy guides for the first two games. Inspired to expand the X-COM Universe by LucasArts’ Star Wars games, Ellis determined to create a game using a flight simulator engine and set the new sequel during one of the previous X-COM games. The idea was to let the player experience the events of an earlier game from a different viewpoint. This concept would become X-COM: Interceptor.
Throughout the development process Ellis and his team received fan input from what they referred to (perhaps not so politely) as the “Cult of X-COM” through an open online form and public e-mail. When fans learned that the game was going to be a flight simulator and not a turn-based squad-level combat game, accusations flew that MircoProse was just slapping the X-COM name on something as a marketing gimmick. MicroProse strongly denied this.
Book Review of Courage Under Fire: The 101st Airborne Hidden Battle at Tam Ky by Ed Sherwood, LTC US Army (Retired). 360 pages. Casemate, 2021. $34.95.
By Patrick S. Baker
Recently, publishers have loaded the book shelves with titles touting the “hidden”, or “forgotten”, or “secret”, history of some event. The worst of these so-called “hidden history” books are pseudo-historical bilge, but the best of these books actually tell previously untold stories.
LTC Sherwood’s Courage Under Fire is certainly among the later as it relates the long ignored story of the First Brigade, 101st Airborne Division’s bloody struggle at the Battle of Tam Ky, also known as Operation Lamar Plain, May through August, 1969.
A highly adept researcher and skilled writer, Sherwood has crafted one of the best and most complete narratives of combat in Vietnam ever published. A young lieutenant leading the 3rd Platoon, Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry during the first part of the battle, Sherwood also writes with that precious firsthand knowledge most historians lack.
Yet the narrative rises far above mere personal account, as Sherwood takes care to put the fighting within the context of the tactical, operational and strategic climate of post-Tet Offensive Vietnam. Valuable context is also provided by the multiple maps, nine appendixes and a glossary.
Sherwood portrays the American soldiers, young enlistees or draftees, as well-trained, physically fit and mentally resilient, but who were deficient in combat experience against the North Vietnam Army (NVA). Attrition soon cut the line companies to two platoons, with junior NCOs heading shorthanded squads, yet the troops soldiered on. Sherwood implies that the odds favored the NVA, who had extensive knowledge of the ground, the support of the locals and well-prepared fighting positions. While the Americans depended on the massive firepower provided by artillery and air support, which ultimately made the difference at Tam Ky.
The book concentrates on the lead-up operations and the key battle of Hill 376. The 501st Battalion made the first helicopter combat assault of Lamar Plain on 16 May. Like most such actions in the Vietnam War, Tam Ky involved days and weeks of vicious and intense small-unit actions. Day to day, the casualty numbers seemed small compared to those World War Two, but the numbers gradually and relentlessly grew into the hundreds and then thousands. For each month of combat, Sherwood chronicles what was going on back in the US, or “The World” in soldiers’ slang. Each chapter ends with a table of casualties and medals awarded.
Men of the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, fire from old Viet Cong trenches
In the decisive action of the operation, the Americans launched a frontal assault on Hill 376. For nine brutal days the Americans made a bloody trudge through the rain and mud and enemy ambushes to the top of the hill. After reaching the hilltop, the men raised an American flag on the peak and then walked away, victorious, but also downcast.
The rationale behind the fact that the sacrifice and valor of the men of the 1st Brigade of the “Screaming Eagles” at Tam Ky was intentionally hidden for decades is simple. As Operation Lamar Plain started, headlines back in “the World” were trumpeting the 3rd Brigade’s “meat-grinder” fight at the Battle of Hamburger Hill some 100 miles northwest of Tam Ky. Hamburger Hill left more than six hundred American soldiers killed or wounded.
The politically beleaguered President Nixon and the new American commander in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams, could not afford to openly acknowledge that another 525 Americans soldiers had become casualties in the Battle of Tam Ky; Not directly on the heels of the carnage of Hamburger Hill. The Battle of Tam Ky had to remain official “hidden” for political reasons.
Summing up: I recommend Courage Under Fire in the strongest terms possible. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the Vietnam War, or anyone interested in stories of the courage and camaraderie of men in combat.
Patrick S. Baker is a U.S. Army Veteran, and a retired Department of Defense employee. He holds Bachelor degrees in History and Political Science and a Masters in European History. His history articles have appeared in Military History, Strategy and Tactics, Modern War, Medieval Warfare and Ancient Warfare Magazines.
With copies of the first X-COM game flying off the shelves, MicroProse, now merged with Spectrum Holobyte to form MicroProse, Inc., wanted a sequel to the game in just six months. The Gollop brothers hesitated at this proposal, declaring that all could be done in this timeframe was changing sprites and re-using the original code.
So, instead of developing the sequel the Gollops licensed the game code to MicroProse, that would produce the sequel, named X-COM: Terror from the Deep, in-house. Meanwhile, the Gollops went to work on what would become the third game in the series.
Terror was released on 1 June 1995 for DOS PCs and then ported to the PlayStation the next year. The game tells the story of the Second Alien War, some forty years after the First Alien War. Following the destruction of the Alien Brain on Mars, extraterrestrials under the Earth’s seas awaken after millions of years. These new aliens begin to terrorize ships and ports, and abducting humans. The X-COM organization is revived to fight this new alien menace from the deep.
Firelock recently announced their , the gun-toting women ‘Boucaniere’. The project “funded” in record time, and digital modeling is underway for a full release of the ladies. We’ll be seeing them in live metal soon, but where do these women come from, and how do they fit into Blood & Plunder?
The only lists that Boucaniere appear in are the French ‘Chasseurs’ and ‘Caribbean Militia’ subfactions. These factions reflect the early 17th century French settlements in the Spanish Main. Despite their reputation, these settlers were not adventurers, but refugees of religious persecution.
The mid-1990s was the Axial Age for personal computer games. Titles like Civilization, Steel Panthers, Panzer General and X-COM: UFO Defense (known outside North America, as UFO: Enemy Unknown) were released with staggering success. These seminal games essential created a whole entertainment genre of PC strategy games.
Perhaps the most important of all these was the first X-COM game. X-COM: UFO Defense is still considered to be one of the most influential games ever made. Further, some have argued that X-COM is not just a franchise, but is actually its own genre. In short, to say “X-COM game” is to define a game type, like “first person shooter” or “real-time strategy game”.
The first X-COM game was created by the Gollop brothers, Julian and Nick, under the auspices of the game design studio they founded, Mythos Games, in partnership with game publisher, MircoProse. Julian had been developing games since the early 1980s, two of his earlier games are direct precursors to X-COM.
The first phase of the Close Combat game franchise came to an end in 2000 with the fifth game in the series, Close Combat V: Invasion: Normandy. Business and management issues left the franchise’s future in doubt, with only three developers still at Atomic still working on it.
Then came the United States Marine Corps (USMC) to the rescue. Militaries worldwide have used “serious games” as training tools ever since the early 19th Century when Kriegsspiel (wargame in German) was created for the Prussian Army. The American Military was impressed by the Close Combat games, especially the realistic physiological modeling. So, in 2003 the USMC reached out to Atomic to see about building a Close Combat game as a training aid.
In 2004 the USMC and Atomic partnership produced Close Combat: Marines: “A tactical decision-making simulation of modern warfare”, the game was released in the September 2004 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette. It was used as a tactical instructional tool for junior leaders. A civilian version of the game was released in 2004 as Road to Baghdad. This was the first post-World War Two entry in the franchise and the only one without Close Combat in the title.
Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles (SPII:MB) was released in November 1996, just one year and two months after the release of the original Steel Panthers (now referred to as Steel Panthers I or SPI). Grigsby had two main goals while developing the new game; one was to improve the animation and the other was to let the players simulate most of the armed conflicts, both major and minor, historical or hypothetical, throughout the world, from 1950 to 1999.
By Patrick S. Baker
X-COM: Interceptor
By Patrick S. Baker
By Patrick S. Baker