Obliterate!

Obliterate!
Obliterate!
Developer(s)	Bill Wadsworth, Gary Zabel
Publisher(s)	Mercury 332
Platform(s)	Prestel
Release	1981, 1982
Genre(s)	Simulation

Last updated July 08, 2023

Obliterate! is a 1981 video game published by Mercury 332 that ran on the Prestel online service. The player takes the role of the commander of the fictional Royal Navy submarine HMS Mercury 332 and is given the mission of sinking the Argentine flagship, the Frey Bentos.

History

Prestel was an early videotext service offered by British Telecom starting in 1979. Users normally used the service using a television and set-top box which included a simple keypad for entering commands. The data was paged, in a fashion similar to modern web pages, and could be called up either through navigation buttons in a page-to-page way, or by entering page numbers or from menus. In spite of these technical limitations, the service soon offered a number of simple video games that were page-based. By 1982, the service had about 18,000 regular users in the UK and about 5,000 more in the United States using an emulator on the Apple II.^[1]

Obliterate! was written by Bill Wadsworth and Gary Zabel in early 1981, long before the opening of the Falklands War. Zabel was the editor of Mercury 332, the Prestel publishing division of the St. Regis Newspapers based in Bolton, Greater Manchester. At the time of its initial release, it was a generic submarine game without any nationalities mentioned. When the war opened on 2 April 1982, the authors quickly updated the text to suggest it was taking place in the Falklands, making it "more topical and fun",^[2] selecting a Spanish-sounding name for the enemy ship based on a UK brand of canned meat (itself named for a port city in Uruguay) and the submarine based on their own company. The updated version went live on 7 April.^[3]

Within days, it was being mentioned in the press in both the UK and US.^[4] It gained widespread notoriety when Member of Parliament Bob Cryer commented on the press coverage and described the game as encouraging people "to see war as nothing more than a game."^[5] In the Daily Mirror , Napier Crookenden stated "it sounds in appalling taste."^[6] The Guardian noted: "I'm afraid there's a terrible outbreak of jingoism in Britain. Have you heard about the dotty old lady in Wales who's dialing numbers at random in Argentina and singing 'Rule Britannia'? This game won't be the last of it."^[1]

This initial coverage led to other newspapers picking up the story and creating a press frenzy with worldwide front-page coverage.^[3] The constant press coverage led the authors to pull the game off the service.^{[lower-alpha 1]} This led to another frenzy among Prestel users who demanded it be brought back immediately. Mercury 332 published a newsletter that summer that used the notoriety, saying "Prestel is a household name... due to our game!", and quoting Zabel as noting "I believe it has gained more publicity for Prestel than any marketing campaign.^[3]

Yet another round of press coverage followed the next month after the 2 May sinking of the ARA General Belgrano, which clear similarities to the action in the game. Zabel described the coincidence as "spooky".^[3]

Description

After a preamble in which the background story is explained, the actions starts with a text-based view of the scene through the periscope. The player is first asked to estimate the range to the target, entering 1 through 10 for the corresponding number of 1000 yard increments, and then the speed of the ship. When entered, a new display appears showing the results, either a hit or miss. In the case of a miss, the user is given the option of a second try, but no third, a second miss resulted in the Bentos sinking your submarine.^[1]

Notes

↑ The exact date is not mentioned, but "five days" and "a week" are,^[7] which would be sometime around 12 April.

Related Research Articles

The Falklands War was a ten-week undeclared war between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982 over two British dependent territories in the South Atlantic: the Falkland Islands and its territorial dependency, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. The conflict began on 2 April, when Argentina invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands, followed by the invasion of South Georgia the next day. On 5 April, the British government dispatched a naval task force to engage the Argentine Navy and Air Force before making an amphibious assault on the islands. The conflict lasted 74 days and ended with an Argentine surrender on 14 June, returning the islands to British control. In total, 649 Argentine military personnel, 255 British military personnel, and three Falkland Islanders were killed during the hostilities.

Admiral Sir John Forster "Sandy" Woodward, was a senior Royal Navy officer who commanded the Task Force of the Falklands War.

ARAGeneral Belgrano (C-4) was an Argentine Navy light cruiser in service from 1951 until 1982. Originally commissioned by the U.S. Navy as USS Phoenix, she saw action in the Pacific theatre of World War II before being sold to Argentina. The vessel was the second to have been named after the Argentine founding father Manuel Belgrano (1770–1820). The first vessel was a 7,069-ton armoured cruiser completed in 1896.

HMS <i>Conqueror</i> (S48) Submarine of the Royal Navy

HMS Conqueror was a British Churchill-class nuclear-powered fleet submarine which served in the Royal Navy from 1971 to 1990. She was the third submarine of her class, following the earlier Churchill and Courageous, that were all designed to face the Soviet threat at sea. She was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead.

ARA Veinticinco de Mayo (V-2) was an aircraft carrier in the Argentine Navy from 1969 to 1997. The English translation of the name is Twenty-fifth of May, which is the date of Argentina's May Revolution in 1810.

ARA San Luis (S-32) was a Type 209 diesel-powered submarine of the Argentine Navy. Built in Germany, San Luis has a displacement of 1,285 tonnes and was commissioned in 1974. The submarine operated against the Royal Navy during the Falklands War without any noticeable success, but survived a number of anti-submarine sweeps carried out by British frigates. San Luis was struck in 1997 after an incomplete overhaul.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prestel</span> British viewdata system

Prestel, the brand name for the UK Post Office Telecommunications's Viewdata technology, was an interactive videotex system developed during the late 1970s and commercially launched in 1979. It achieved a maximum of 90,000 subscribers in the UK and was eventually sold by BT in 1994.

USS Collett (DD-730) was a World War II-era Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer in the service of the United States Navy.

The three Churchill class, sometimes known as the Repeat Valiant-class submarines were nuclear-powered fleet submarines which served with the Royal Navy from the 1970s until the early 1990s. The Churchill class was based on the older Valiant class, but featured many internal improvements.

USS Borie (DD-704), an Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer, was the second ship of the United States Navy to be named for Adolph E. Borie, Secretary of the Navy under President Ulysses S. Grant.

Fernando Zylberberg is a retired field hockey player from Argentina.

Port Belgrano Naval Base is the largest naval base of the Argentine Navy, situated next to Punta Alta, near Bahía Blanca, about 560 km (348 mi) south of Buenos Aires. It is named after the brigantine General Belgrano which sounded the area in late 1824.

The Royal Navy Submarine Service is one of the five fighting arms of the Royal Navy. It is sometimes known as the Silent Service, as submarines are generally required to operate undetected.

Strike Fleet is a 1988 video game developed by Lucasfilm Games and published by Electronic Arts. It was released for the Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS. Strike Fleet is the unofficial sequel to the war game PHM: Pegasus.

The cultural impact of the Falklands War spanned several media in both Britain and Argentina. A number of films and television productions emerged from the conflict. The first Argentine film about the war was Los chicos de la guerra in 1984. The BBC drama Tumbledown (1988) tells the story of a British officer paralysed from a bullet wound. The computer game Harrier Attack (1983) and the naval strategy game Strike Fleet (1987) are two examples of Falklands-related games. A number of fictional works were set during the Falklands War, including in Stephen King's novella The Langoliers (1990), in which the character Nick Hopewell is a Falklands veteran. The war provided a wealth of material for non-fiction writers; in the United Kingdom (UK) an important account became Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins' The Battle for the Falklands.

USS Luiseno (ATF-156) was an Abnaki-class fleet ocean tug built for the United States Navy during World War II. Named after the Luiseño peoples, she was the only U.S. Naval vessel to bear the name.

The Total Exclusion Zone (TEZ) was an area declared by the United Kingdom on 30 April 1982 covering a circle of radius 200 nautical miles from the centre of the Falkland Islands. During the Falklands War any sea vessel or aircraft from any country entering the zone may have been fired upon without further warning.

There have been several British 21-inch (533 mm) torpedoes used by the Royal Navy since their first development just before the First World War.

Iwo Jima is a turn-based strategy video game developed and published by Personal Software Services for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum in 1986. It is the second instalment to the Strategic Wargames series. The game is set during the Battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific Ocean theatre of World War II and revolves around the United States Marine Corps' objective to secure the island of Iwo Jima from the Imperial Japanese Army.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diana Gould–Margaret Thatcher exchange</span> 1983 BBC television spat over Falklands war

An exchange on 24 May 1983 between Diana Gould, an English schoolteacher and former Women's Royal Naval Service meteorological officer, and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was voted in 1999 as one of Britain's most memorable television spots. Appearing as a member of the public on BBC Nationwide's On the Spot live election special, Gould confronted Thatcher over the sinking of the Belgrano, an Argentine warship, during the 1982 Falklands War between the United Kingdom and Argentina.

References

Bibliography

"Sink the Frey Bentos!". Time. 26 April 1982. p. 55.
Zito, Tom (10 April 1982). "How to Become the Ruler of Queen's Navee". The Washington Post.
"Video game on war in Falklands stirred up heated controversy in Britain". 80 Micro. August 1982. p. 310.
"New video war game features Falkland Islands". UPI. 10 April 1982.
"The TV War Game". Daily Mirror. 10 April 1982. p. 1.
Day, Micheal (October 1982). "Telegaming". Compute!. pp. 189–190.