Chris Crawford on Game Design

Chapter 18. Eastern Front (1941)

In August of 1980, I saw a wonderful bit of software (I believe it was written by Ed Logg) for the Atari Home Computer System (HCS) that set up a huge map and smoothly scrolled through it. The map was done with character graphics, but the HCS had the ability to change character sets, so it was not difficult to use graphic character sets to assemble a map or larger image. I realized that this opened up a world of possibilities for wargames. No longer would we need to squeeze the entire map onto a single 320×192 screen; now we could have huge maps. I sat down and wrote a routine that duplicated the functions of the original demo, then designed a custom character set for map use, and finally assembled a map using ...