Effective fire. [Image by Eoin Corrigan]
Whirlwind was a mystifying jumble of chits comprising a game about mercenary helicopter pilots in Revolutionary Iran. I didn’t get the game at all, but I thought the map of Iran and the helicopter chits were pretty neat.
Advanced Squad Leader was also a let-down at first — to my exasperation it turned out to be just a rulebook with no pieces. When I overcame my pre-teen indignation and sat down to read it, I was mesmerized. Here was a game of WWII combat that simulated individual infantry squads in excruciating detail. It blew my mind. It was nothing like the video games I played with my friends, which rewarded reflexes and hand-eye coordination, qualities that my Little League coaches noted that I possessed in no measurable quantities. ASL was about patience and cunning and moxie, which I did have — or at least, I thought I was more likely to develop. I promptly flipped those Whirlwind chits over onto their blank sides and inked them up into ersatz ASL counters.
ASL became a kind of religion for me. I took me weeks of poring over the enormous rulebook for its obscured truths to become clear to me, and I preached the virtues of the game to every neighborhood kid I could wrangle into sitting down for a tutorial. Re-readings of the rulebook and new gameplay situations led to moments of revelation and doctrinal revision. It was probably six months before the version of Advanced Squad Leader being played in my neighborhood resembled the intended gameplay, but my fellow converts and I carried on playing it for years.
John Hill, who designed the original Squad Leader (from which ASL descended) and many other notable wargames, passed away last week at the age of 69. Even if you never played Squad Leader or its immediate offspring, you’ve probably played a game that it influenced. Squad Leader’s attention to low-level tactical detail was unique for its time. The game sold hundreds of thousands of copies and spawned tournaments, meet-ups, and mailing lists all over the world. It inspired game designers like X-Com creator Julian Gollop and attempts to translate it into a computer game gave us Atomic’s Close Combat and Combat Mission.
Lift a glass for John Hill tonight. And I’ll see if I can’t find my make-shift ASL counters the next time I’m at my parents’ house. (Hat-tip to Michael B. for passing on the news.)
Sunday links after the jump.
Since this is the first Sunday Almanac since I ducked out to get married last year, I have a biblical deluge of links here. Have at ‘em.
- 75 years of Blue Note album covers. The next time we remodel Pocket Tactics I’m just going to send the designer the Page One album cover and say, “make us look like this”.
- NASA’s tourism posters for exoplanets.
- Dolphins like to get high on puffer fish toxins. (If I had written an article about this, the title would have been “Puffer, puffer, give”.)
- A cartoon diary of life in LA County jail.
- Brilliant anecdotes from The Wire‘s sound editor.
- Caribou (whose Our Love was one of my two or three favorite records of 2014) made a 1,000-song YouTube playlist to give to people who ask him what kind of music he’s into.
- The decline and fall of Glasgow Rangers, the once-mighty Scottish football club who now play against semi-pro teams in front of tiny crowds.
- Concept art from the Alien sequel that Neil Blomkamp didn’t get to make.
- More Alien: what if the Xenomorph is actually a tragic hero?
- Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov chilling at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, 1944.
- More Asimov: endorsing Radio Shack’s Tandy computers in 1982.
- “Missing parrot turns up minus British accent and speaking Spanish”.
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