Eastern Front (1941)

Some comments from Chris Crawford on this game (the full interview with Chris Crawford by James Hague can be found here):

JH: 'Eastern Front was a state of the art wargame in its time. What deficiencies of contemporary games were you trying to overcome?'

CC: 'Two: poor user interface and poor artificial intelligence. I came up with slick solutions to both problems. The AI was particularly clever. All the user I/O was taken care of during vertical blank processing, a few thousand cycles every 60th of a second. The AI itself ran during the mainline processing, using a system of convergent approximations. Thus, the AI started off with a stupid move and then kept examining improvements on it. You could take as long as you wanted to plan your own move, but every second you took to plan your move, the computer got another million cycles to refine its own move.'

JH: 'Why was Eastern Front released through the Atari Program Exchange instead of the official Atari label?'

CC: 'Because the Atari marketing people thought that a wargame would never sell.'