I love this game, this ‘Silent Service,’ cat and mouse carried to unheard of extremes...roles easily interchanged; eyes extended just above the waterline. As if I've always been here...ten days out of Darwin, on station in the Java Sea; infinite torpedoes, visibility good. Suddenly a lookout shouts down from the tower, "Bow astarboard!"...dots on the horizon.

     We'll stay on the surface, till submergence necessary, then raise that magic eye. Closing steadily on tankers, troop carriers, dots growing rapidly in size. We've hunted you a myriad of times, off Rabaul, and in the Sea of Japan, firing off pickles with a lethal kiss; the boys at Pearl repeatedly avenged. Tables easily turned. Sweating 400 feet below your propellers, pushing our luck in the test depth range; the sound of Pennsylvania steel complaining...waiting for more terrible sounds.

     Battle computer closing distance: six thousand, five thousand, four thousand yards; dots expanded to another convoy just within reach. Fish away, but then comes that familiar: PING - PING - PING - PING...

     We crash dive for the temperature gradient, desperate to elude the kaibokan closing at 18 knots. Deep - deeper - deeper still, but the Jap sonar's still locked on us. Engines 1/4, rig for silent running. Ears once again full with a destroyer, screws turning, with special deliveries...directly above.

     But all along another dot's been getting closer, barely noticeable at first, but growing in size; slowly crowding out the battle with a strange new power. A voice in the distance, not one of the crew. Getting larger - closer - larger still. Suddenly, just as the depth charges are about to reach us, the screens, instruments, everything goes dead.

     "Didn't you hear me calling? It's time for supper!" shouts my wife, standing above me, as she drops a plate of food, and scores a direct hit on my Nintendo.


© 1992

1,120 hits as of December 2023

09/17/2014

Author's Note: At the time of writing this I had already been divorced 2 years, and so using a little poetic licence, the part of about the wife at the end I thought would be a clever literary device to close off the piece with a bang. Truth is I never played the game during my marriage. Called Silent Service (SS), and released in 1985, the video game that inspired Dots... was one of the first submarine simulations, and played on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Although only an 8-bit program, it was widely praised for its realism, and considered the best for its time. SS provided the inspiration for a series of games that followed, and over the next two decades, as technology improved, the complexity and realism of this type of military simulation evolved with it. One final point of interest. In real life, the first tell tale sign of ships approaching would be smoke on the horizon, but as the technology at the time didn’t allow for this, SS utilized a combination of tiny dots to represent ships in the distance, that grew steadily larger and more detailed as they came into range.

Posted on 09/17/2014
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