Chris Crawford on Game Design

Fade Away

Avalon-Hill continued to sell Tanktics for a number of years, but the lack of graphics was a severe weakness; the development of good on-screen maps quickly made the game obsolete. Interestingly, though, the gameplay wasn't surpassed for quite some time. Armored combat wargames couldn't match Tanktics' variety of tank types, richness of terrain, or complexity of combat results calculations for several years. Nevertheless, by 1985, Tanktics was dead. The game has been so completely forgotten that Interplay recently published a game under the same name, completely unaware of the original. When I searched the Web recently for “Tanktics,” I got some 1700 hits for the Interplay game. Narrowing the search to my game yielded just seven hits. ...