Published in 1981 by the Atari Program Exchange, Eastern Front (1941) put the player in command of the German corps invading the Soviet Union. A smoothly scrolling map, terrain, weather, supply lines, morale, and fatigue: all of it running on a home computer while the competition was still drawing grids. On the other side sat an artificial intelligence that genuinely planned ahead, and a winter that arrived right on schedule to freeze any triumphant offensive in its tracks.
It was the serious game that sold Atari computers: more than 60,000 copies sold, Creative Computing's Game of the Year in 1981, and an official cartridge reissue in 1982. Crawford also put the source code up for sale through APX itself, an extraordinarily rare gesture for the time. Rarely has a defeat at the gates of Moscow taught so much.
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