A comprehensive online resource about writer Len Deighton

_{Blitzkrieg - Commodore 64 - 1984}

Summary

It is not clear how this came to be referred to as Len Deighton's Blitzkrieg. While it makes passing reference to the full title of the book which came out eight years previously, there's no indication that it was officially endorsed by Deighton or his publishers, i.e. there is no author photograph on the game packaging, on the instruction sheet inside nor, indeed, in the game itself. As the book itself was first published five year's earlier, there's also no obvious tie-in aspect either. Perhaps the game makers simply wanted to associate the game with the writer of the most popular history of this era, to provide a degree of authenticity.

The game is ostensibly a real-time war game running the period May to September 1940; the average gametime was forty minutes, so this was no intense strategy game. The player controls divisions and industrial units in NW France, each of which had its own data card. The gameplay, however, was by all accounts poor and required little skill of the game, though it was well programmed. The graphics were, for the early 1980s, relatively good, more so on the Commodore 128K version of the game. Each copy of the game came with a gridded map of north-east France, the Benelux countries and western Germany. Interestingly, the player is asked to command the German High Command only, making clearer perhaps the link to Deighton's book. You are given 80,000 additional points if you defeat Britain; you also have the option of winning without capturing Paris.

By all accounts, looking at reviews of the game from the period, it lacked the sort of thrills which early gamers were looking for and - even allowing for the limited technology of the time - was not a massive seller. It also had little actual link with Deighton's book. The game's designers were John Lambshead, Gordon Paterson and Nicholas Palmer. They also designed the novel tie-in novel for Frederick Forsythe's The Fourth Protocol.

A .pdf of the review of the game in the popular games review magazine of the time, Zzap 64, can be found here.

(c) R Mallows 2009