I keep a legal pad on my desk filled with inscrutable scratchings, such as "SB HBs -> AF," "Air Shuttle Suva," "TF Halsey," "Makassar->Shock," and "MO DBs to 10k." These gnomic inscriptions are my guide to what I should do in my upcoming turn for War in the Pacific. Any game that compels me to take detailed notes in my own unique shorthand certainly has my attention.
Gary Grigsby's War in the Pacific is probably the most ambitious wargame ever made - other than every other Gary Grigsby game. It seeks to simulate as much of the 1941-45 conflict between Japan and most of the rest of the world with as much fidelity as humanly possible - and a lot that's impossible. As a player, you have control over every significant unit - and a few that aren't - down to individual ships, battalions, and squadrons of aircraft. Want to set up a patrol route for a tiny Dutch minesweeper armed with only a Lewis gun? Knock yourself out.
You move these digital dogfaces and swabbies around a simply massive map encompassing half the world, from Yemen to Panama and from Tahiti to Alaska, broken up into 40km hexes. Each turn is by default a single day, though you can set it to as long as 4 days if you're feeling bold. One day sounds like a long time, until you realize that the real life war lasted over a thousand days and that a turn in War in the Pacific can take an hour to plan and execute.
Despite this dizzying scope, WitP is a tough game to love. The graphics were dated looking even when it launched back in 2004, though some of the pixel art ships and planes are charming. The interface is painfully cumbersome - there's hardly a tooltip or context menu to be seen. Unity of Command, this is not. If you think my scratchings at the start of the post are bad, wait until you try to decipher all the information you are given about a typical base. Even after years of playing the game on and off, there are mechanics and terms I simply don't understand.
That said, there are reasons I keep coming back to this flawed masterpiece. Sure, part of it is a history nerd's love of minutiae. I have discovered so much I didn't know about this war, even with my background in military history. Did you know that the Dutch had a half-decommissioned pre-dreadnought battleship, the Soerabaja, floating around the East Indies? Neither did I, until I started playing this game, found the ship, and looked it up online. As cut and dry as the game can seem, it's strangely impactful. Sure, you might read in a book that the Allies were in a tight spot in 1941 and 1942, but it's a whole different matter being the commander in the hot seat, responsible for salvaging this mess. The first time I played, I had this yawning sense of dread when I looked around the map and realized that the only planes I had outside of the Phillippines, Java, Malaya, and Hawaii were obsolete trainers.
There's also a tremendous tension. As the Allies, you know that Kido Butai, the dreaded Japanese carrier task force, is out there somewhere. Until mid 1942, when you can start assembling enough carriers to match it, that fleet, like Medusa, destroys anything it beholds. It's less like strategy and more like playing a horror game - Alien Isolation or Amnesia - where the monster is un-killable and all you can do is cower in a locker or run when you see it.
The game has tremendous highs and lows. In my current game, I went from ambushing a Japanese light carrier off Java, pumping my fist as every five-hundred pound bomb slammed into her flight deck, to moaning in dismay the next turn as all four of my precious American carriers stumbled headlong into Kido Butai and were set aflame stem to stern. Luckily(?) the game crashed and I lost that save, giving me a chance to try a different tack.
Have I mentioned the bugs? Let's just say this game is not meant to run on Windows 10 and leave it at that. God help you if you try to alt tab or your Antivirus software tries to launch a scan. When you get back into the game, the screen glitches out and you get barely decipherable gibberish for text. Plus every now and then the game decides the letter 'o' has displeased it and will no longer display, but leave the rest of the alphabet intact. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
War in the Pacific is, despite its clunky appearance, a surprisingly cinematic game that tells grand stories. I interviewed "Grey Hunter," a man who posted a Let's Play of one turn per day for over four years, recreating the whole war on the Something Awful forums. And as someone who read most of it day by day, it's seriously engrossing and suspenseful and drives home just how long the war must have seemed to our grandparents, reading about it in the newspaper at home or on the front. We were in suspense waiting for each update, just like they were. You can read the entire Let's Play archived here.
The sheer scope and scale of the game has its own appeal. Some might not enjoy fiddling with all the little pixel men and digital destroyers, but the game has a unique sense of satisfaction. There's a feeling of satisfaction that comes from knowing each and every action taken on screen was because of your actions (or negligence). There's no abstraction. It's like some massive diorama of the world and you get to tinker with your train set, looking down and knowing "Hey, I did that." When you pull off a successful invasion, it's the culmination of hours of effort - or when you flub it and lose the USS Enterprise, it's a shiv to the gut. That sense of ownership is what would be missing if the game abstracted more mechanics or gave you more shortcuts.
There's also a sense that anything can happen. In my current game, my carrier task force blundered into Kido Butai, on its way to bomb Pearl Harbor, and the carriers exchanged shots in the confused night battle. When dawn came, the Japanese had decided to withdraw and Pearl Harbor was never attacked, leaving me with a whole Battleship Row of new possibilities.
On the whole, there's nothing quite like War in the Pacific, for better or for worse. It's a way to time travel and pretend you were in the shoes of Chester Nimitz or Admiral Yamamoto, directing the war from on high with a simply unreal sense of detail and granularity. There's just nothing like it, at least until Matrix Games decides to put out a proper sequel. We can only hope this one has a modern interface and doesn't hate the letter 'o.'
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