M1 Tank Platoon
| M1 Tank Platoon | |
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Cover art
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| Developer(s) | MPS Labs |
| Publisher(s) | MicroProse |
| Designer(s) | Arnold Hendrick, Scott Spanburg |
| Platform(s) | Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS |
| Release | 1989 |
| Genre(s) | Simulation, real-time tactics |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
M1 Tank Platoon is a tactical simulation of tank warfare, released by MicroProse for the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and DOS in 1989. It featured a mixture of first-person tank warfare and tactical simulation gameplay. It was followed by a sequel, M1 Tank Platoon II, which was released by MicroProse in 1998 for Windows. M1 Tank Platoon was sold to Interplay Entertainment on March 27, 2009.
The player is put in the position of a main battle tank platoon commander in charge of four U.S. M1 Abrams tanks in a fictional campaign of battles against the Soviet Army in Central Europe. The player can give orders to friendly units via a tactical map of the battle area as well as taking control of a single tank - assuming the role of either the tank commander, driver or gunner.
Depending on the player's tastes, the whole game could be played more like an action/simulation game or like a strategy game. As platoon commander, direct control is limited to the four M1 tanks, however depending on the mission, support units like recon and attack helicopters, M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, MLRS artillery systems or other older M60 Patton tanks were available and could be given orders via the tactical map.
One feature of the game was the ability to change the viewpoint to a supporting unit to get a "recon" from that unit's perspective. According to the manual, doing this from the M1 tanks was supposedly approximate to a tank commander standing on his tank hull to get a better perspective. This external view feature was also very good (for the time) for cinematic experiences like the "director's chair" where the viewpoint is set to a helicopter doing reconnaissance. The external view was also able to track other objects in the centre of the view. This was not limited to vehicles but could actually track missiles or even tank rounds.
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