Tiptoe outside the friendly confines of your technological marvel and follow your feline instincts through tight tunnels and mysterious waterways to scavenge for new weapons and gear. Primitive, but honorable for the pioneer that it was.Pounce inside of your cozy armored mech and set off on a dangerous trek through an alien underworld full of irritable creatures and treacherous obstacles in a valiant effort to save your stranded captain and his crashed spaceship. When the first players encountered Gato, you can imagine they thought it was pretty significant. Gato was the Pong of submarine simulations. Your primary strategic objective was to complete as many missions as possible with the supplies you carry before returning to the quadrant where your subtender waits. Resource management was one of the game's subtler features. Some messages may be enemy fakes designed to trap you.' How's that for early efforts at realism? You were instructed to keep in mind 'the enemy may break Allied code at some point. You pressed the 'M' key for new missions and they were transmitted by Morse code. The mission area was very limited-a group of islands in the Pacific, which was subdivided into 20 'quadrants'.

Although it simulated GATO class subs, there were only four bow torpedo tubes available.Īll functions were generated by the keyboard (mouse? what's a mouse?). The graphics were very limited, CGA with stick figures for ships, of which there were five enemy types. As the submarine history page at Subsim.Ĭom describes it: 'This was the first sub simulator for a personal computer. The first World War II submarine simulation ever made for the PC, GATO was a true pioneer in this niche genre, an ambitious sim that features a lot of realistic instruments and weapons.

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