You couldn't make Sub Mission today.
The development history of this game is a weird one. This Polygon article goes into it in a lot more detail, but I'll do you the courtesy of giving a condensed version. Tom Snyder of Tom Snyder Productions (who would later go on to invent Squigglevision and put out shows like Dr. Katz and Home Movies) was a school teacher who made and programmed his own games to help out his students. One day, he decided it was time to make something for himself. He wanted a video game with real-world stakes. His first shot at chasing this thrill was to play Microsoft Flight Simulator and fire at German planes until he lost; if he got shot down three times, he would have to destroy his copy of the game.
He did, and then he did.
Tom Snyder took a pair of scissors to the floppy disc, cut it into some very expensive ribbons, and then that was that. Or it would have been, if that act of destruction hadn't sparked an idea. Surely, he couldn't have been the only one who wanted something like this. "Computer games" as a concept were evolving fast, and titles were coming out one after the other that were all pursuing something that nobody had attempted before. So, what if there was a game where the idea of permanently ruining your physical copy of it was given not just as a self-imposed challenge, but as a direct, mandatory consequence for losing?
After a lot of revisions, tweaking, and meddling from a shocked publisher who insisted on making it a little less brutal (in the worst case scenario, you could still fill out an included petition and buy a new copy for $7.00, instead of the requisite $40.00), Sub Mission: A Matter of Life and Death was unleashed on the public. Like you might expect of an Apple II game, it found an audience, but it didn't set the world on fire. The computer gaming market was a lot smaller in 1986, and the Cambrian explosion it's seen in recent years hasn't been especially kind to most games that came out before Windows 95. The fact that this review is the first time that anyone on Backloggd has ever interacted with this game in any way might help to illustrate how deep of a niche Sub Mission has fallen into with the passage of time. I don't even know where I heard about it. I found the Polygon article after I'd already decided to play it and was busy tracking down a .pdf of the manual so I could figure out how to move the submarine.
The game is very simple, despite all of the imposing, harshly-colored dials and view screens dotted all over the frame. In the middle of the game window sits a map of the bay you're floating in. Your objective is to find the Deep Mine before the AI-controlled overlord can. You do this by diving down, shooting lesser mines, and then seeing if the Deep Mine is somewhere in the blast radius. If it is, then you can patrol around for other lesser mines or drop up to five of your own to help triangulate it. When you've narrowed it down to a small patch of water, you blow your ballast vents, sink to the bottom, shoot the Deep Mine, and then win. You could probably remake the game's mechanics with a pen and a piece of grid paper. It's not bad, but it's — ironically — not very deep. It's heavy on the randomness, and mostly feels like a roll of the dice as to whether or not you'll luck into pinging the Deep Mine before the overlord can.
But the twist here is that your first game must be played with a robot on board. As the manual warns, there are two people you're in charge of rescuing named Sigourney and Peter, and they can and will both die if you fail too hard. Lose one, and you can never try to rescue them again. Lose both, and the game is bricked. Both Sigourney and Peter will chat with you while you're patrolling around in search of mines; they use a lot of proper nouns and speak vaguely about their history (Sigourney interrupted me lining up a shot to say that she once caught The Virus while in space, and then never spoke of it again), which makes it a little difficult to get attached. But they absolutely have character, and I didn't want to see them die. That would mean not only missing out on whatever weird non-sequiturs they were going to keep throwing at me, but also that my time with the game would be done and the floppy would be worthless.
It didn't take long to find out that I was bad at Sub Mission, and both Sigourney and Peter were dead.
I got greedy with my dives, running out of air and reserve power. I was impatient and followed bad leads. My brief time with the robot ended with me getting lucky in the tutorial, not me figuring the whole game out before I'd taken a human passenger. That was the end of Sub Mission. I had lost. The game was unplayable.
Unplayable-ish.
See, in 2022, getting around this is trivial. I could download a fresh copy of the game for free, pop it into my Apple II emulator, and try as many times as I wanted to. I could back my own copy up before playing. I could load save states. I could cheat. All of a sudden, the threat of being unable to play the game anymore ceases to exist. There isn't any actual danger, because there's nothing to really be lost. Just try again, as much as you need.
That's against the spirit of the game, though. I went into it intending to meet it on its own terms, and I'm not interested in subverting that. I think it'd feel cheap. I'm willing to live with the fact that I fucked up and got everyone killed in Sub Mission, because that's not a feeling I can get from pretty much any game released since.
Remember what I said in the very first sentence, about how you couldn't make it today? You couldn't, and I mean that. It would be too easy to get around on a technical level, and the audience absolutely wouldn't stand for it. Undertale's Genocide Route or Oneshot's true ending have tried to buck this problem of permanence by making edits to your system registry, but reverting those isn't hard. A game that relies on servers checking your connection to verify if it's you would be foiled by anyone with either a VPN or the know-how to punch a few /ipconfig commands into their terminal. Physical media with expiry dates like Flexplay's 48-hour self-destructing DVDs were such a massive fiscal failure that no publisher in their right mind would ever try to bring something similar back to market. Faster and faster internet connections have made mass piracy easier than ever, and the indie space (who would be the only ones still foolhardy enough to try this again) don't have the money for the DRM to block people from just downloading a new copy and trying again.
Before we get away from that part about audience complaints, I want to point at a recent example of something similar to Sub Mission. The game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice threatens early on that dying too much will cause your save file to be permanently erased, forcing you to start from scratch. Some people thought this was interesting, and liked the feeling of paranoia that message imposed upon them; a lot of people were furious at the concept alone and vowed never to let their money touch the hands of the people responsible. Most notorious among the latter camp was John "Totalbiscuit" Bain, who did what historians would call "absolutely shitting his pants" over the matter. He came out swinging against the game, deriding it for being anti-consumer, mocking the developers, and rebuking that it was a decision made to support the game's tone with the statement that "maybe they're stupid". Of course, you should always take the opinion of just one guy with a grain of salt, but this was a very influential just one guy. The discourse surrounding Hellblade had been set, and while time has been a lot kinder to it, the initial reception was mired by a lot of people who were very angry at the prospect of losing their save files because they died too often. The thought of releasing Sub Mission today, to the same crowd, is unthinkable. Not only would you lose your save file, but you'd lose access to even having the opportunity to try again. It wouldn't happen. The only chance it would have at not being completely crucified on release would be if you put it out for free, but then we just lead right back into the point about it being technically infeasible to pull off the same gimmick, anyway.
Sub Mission is decent fun, but it's in the same way that taking a trip to the museum is fun. You're seeing a little slice of a neglected point in history, where something happened that modern conveniences could never permit to happen again today. It might not be a bad thing that we'll never get another game like Sub Mission, but the thought still makes me feel a little sad. The world has moved past it, and games like it. For the briefest, briefest period of time, the conditions were absolutely perfect to make it, and Tom Snyder delivered as best as he possibly could have. In a way, the past 36 years have been a refutation of the game's stated permanent consequences.
Nothing lasts forever.
The development history of this game is a weird one. This Polygon article goes into it in a lot more detail, but I'll do you the courtesy of giving a condensed version. Tom Snyder of Tom Snyder Productions (who would later go on to invent Squigglevision and put out shows like Dr. Katz and Home Movies) was a school teacher who made and programmed his own games to help out his students. One day, he decided it was time to make something for himself. He wanted a video game with real-world stakes. His first shot at chasing this thrill was to play Microsoft Flight Simulator and fire at German planes until he lost; if he got shot down three times, he would have to destroy his copy of the game.
He did, and then he did.
Tom Snyder took a pair of scissors to the floppy disc, cut it into some very expensive ribbons, and then that was that. Or it would have been, if that act of destruction hadn't sparked an idea. Surely, he couldn't have been the only one who wanted something like this. "Computer games" as a concept were evolving fast, and titles were coming out one after the other that were all pursuing something that nobody had attempted before. So, what if there was a game where the idea of permanently ruining your physical copy of it was given not just as a self-imposed challenge, but as a direct, mandatory consequence for losing?
After a lot of revisions, tweaking, and meddling from a shocked publisher who insisted on making it a little less brutal (in the worst case scenario, you could still fill out an included petition and buy a new copy for $7.00, instead of the requisite $40.00), Sub Mission: A Matter of Life and Death was unleashed on the public. Like you might expect of an Apple II game, it found an audience, but it didn't set the world on fire. The computer gaming market was a lot smaller in 1986, and the Cambrian explosion it's seen in recent years hasn't been especially kind to most games that came out before Windows 95. The fact that this review is the first time that anyone on Backloggd has ever interacted with this game in any way might help to illustrate how deep of a niche Sub Mission has fallen into with the passage of time. I don't even know where I heard about it. I found the Polygon article after I'd already decided to play it and was busy tracking down a .pdf of the manual so I could figure out how to move the submarine.
The game is very simple, despite all of the imposing, harshly-colored dials and view screens dotted all over the frame. In the middle of the game window sits a map of the bay you're floating in. Your objective is to find the Deep Mine before the AI-controlled overlord can. You do this by diving down, shooting lesser mines, and then seeing if the Deep Mine is somewhere in the blast radius. If it is, then you can patrol around for other lesser mines or drop up to five of your own to help triangulate it. When you've narrowed it down to a small patch of water, you blow your ballast vents, sink to the bottom, shoot the Deep Mine, and then win. You could probably remake the game's mechanics with a pen and a piece of grid paper. It's not bad, but it's — ironically — not very deep. It's heavy on the randomness, and mostly feels like a roll of the dice as to whether or not you'll luck into pinging the Deep Mine before the overlord can.
But the twist here is that your first game must be played with a robot on board. As the manual warns, there are two people you're in charge of rescuing named Sigourney and Peter, and they can and will both die if you fail too hard. Lose one, and you can never try to rescue them again. Lose both, and the game is bricked. Both Sigourney and Peter will chat with you while you're patrolling around in search of mines; they use a lot of proper nouns and speak vaguely about their history (Sigourney interrupted me lining up a shot to say that she once caught The Virus while in space, and then never spoke of it again), which makes it a little difficult to get attached. But they absolutely have character, and I didn't want to see them die. That would mean not only missing out on whatever weird non-sequiturs they were going to keep throwing at me, but also that my time with the game would be done and the floppy would be worthless.
It didn't take long to find out that I was bad at Sub Mission, and both Sigourney and Peter were dead.
I got greedy with my dives, running out of air and reserve power. I was impatient and followed bad leads. My brief time with the robot ended with me getting lucky in the tutorial, not me figuring the whole game out before I'd taken a human passenger. That was the end of Sub Mission. I had lost. The game was unplayable.
Unplayable-ish.
See, in 2022, getting around this is trivial. I could download a fresh copy of the game for free, pop it into my Apple II emulator, and try as many times as I wanted to. I could back my own copy up before playing. I could load save states. I could cheat. All of a sudden, the threat of being unable to play the game anymore ceases to exist. There isn't any actual danger, because there's nothing to really be lost. Just try again, as much as you need.
That's against the spirit of the game, though. I went into it intending to meet it on its own terms, and I'm not interested in subverting that. I think it'd feel cheap. I'm willing to live with the fact that I fucked up and got everyone killed in Sub Mission, because that's not a feeling I can get from pretty much any game released since.
Remember what I said in the very first sentence, about how you couldn't make it today? You couldn't, and I mean that. It would be too easy to get around on a technical level, and the audience absolutely wouldn't stand for it. Undertale's Genocide Route or Oneshot's true ending have tried to buck this problem of permanence by making edits to your system registry, but reverting those isn't hard. A game that relies on servers checking your connection to verify if it's you would be foiled by anyone with either a VPN or the know-how to punch a few /ipconfig commands into their terminal. Physical media with expiry dates like Flexplay's 48-hour self-destructing DVDs were such a massive fiscal failure that no publisher in their right mind would ever try to bring something similar back to market. Faster and faster internet connections have made mass piracy easier than ever, and the indie space (who would be the only ones still foolhardy enough to try this again) don't have the money for the DRM to block people from just downloading a new copy and trying again.
Before we get away from that part about audience complaints, I want to point at a recent example of something similar to Sub Mission. The game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice threatens early on that dying too much will cause your save file to be permanently erased, forcing you to start from scratch. Some people thought this was interesting, and liked the feeling of paranoia that message imposed upon them; a lot of people were furious at the concept alone and vowed never to let their money touch the hands of the people responsible. Most notorious among the latter camp was John "Totalbiscuit" Bain, who did what historians would call "absolutely shitting his pants" over the matter. He came out swinging against the game, deriding it for being anti-consumer, mocking the developers, and rebuking that it was a decision made to support the game's tone with the statement that "maybe they're stupid". Of course, you should always take the opinion of just one guy with a grain of salt, but this was a very influential just one guy. The discourse surrounding Hellblade had been set, and while time has been a lot kinder to it, the initial reception was mired by a lot of people who were very angry at the prospect of losing their save files because they died too often. The thought of releasing Sub Mission today, to the same crowd, is unthinkable. Not only would you lose your save file, but you'd lose access to even having the opportunity to try again. It wouldn't happen. The only chance it would have at not being completely crucified on release would be if you put it out for free, but then we just lead right back into the point about it being technically infeasible to pull off the same gimmick, anyway.
Sub Mission is decent fun, but it's in the same way that taking a trip to the museum is fun. You're seeing a little slice of a neglected point in history, where something happened that modern conveniences could never permit to happen again today. It might not be a bad thing that we'll never get another game like Sub Mission, but the thought still makes me feel a little sad. The world has moved past it, and games like it. For the briefest, briefest period of time, the conditions were absolutely perfect to make it, and Tom Snyder delivered as best as he possibly could have. In a way, the past 36 years have been a refutation of the game's stated permanent consequences.
Nothing lasts forever.