This site is fabulous. It's a flickr photostream with shots of someone's little boy playing his Gameboy at various historical sites in Europe and around the Mediterranean.
I remember doing something similar when I was his age (or at least his size . . . como se dice "late bloomer" en espanol?), except it was a novel, not a video game device. As my family traveled around Europe the summer following my 7th grade year, I found myself engrossed in "Team Yankee" by Harold Coyle.
From the Amazon page for the book:
Harold Coyle's Team Yankee: A Novel of World
War III (Presidio Press, 1987) was published a year after Red Storm
Rising's triumphant debut in hardcover, and although it is thematically
similar (Soviet forces invade West Germany after a series of crises
escalate into an all out conventional war), Coyle's approach is very
different from Clancy's. Instead of creating his own possible scenario
for a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact confrontation, he asked for, and received,
permission from British author (and retired General) Sir John Hackett
to set Team Yankee within the scenario created in Hackett's two
"speculative fiction" books The Third World War: August 1985 and The Third World War: The Untold Story.
Team Yankee takes place within a two-week period in an August in
the late 1980s. Since late July, a series of crises precipitated by the
Iran-Iraq war has morphed into a clash between U.S. and Soviet naval
forces in the Persian Gulf region. By August 1, word comes that NATO is
mobilizing and ordering their armed forces, including Bannon and Team
Yankee, to their wartime positions. Soon, the Soviets and their Warsaw
Pact "allies" cross the Inner German Border in force. Team Yankee and
the rest of NATO's forces in West Germany must then fight the invaders
and stop them before the Red Army reaches the Rhine River. After that,
assuming the Soviet attack bogs down, the mission will change from
merely defending territory to taking offensive operations and pushing
the invaders back. The question Coyle poses is, can American soldiers,
using their weapons and tactics against superior numbers of Soviet and
Warsaw Pact soldiers, defeat Russian weapons and tactics?
Readers familiar with Hackett's macrocosmic World War III will know
the big picture, but first-time readers will be turning the pages to
see who wins, who loses, who dies...and who survives in this
outstanding first novel by a true master of the military fiction genre.
The only flaw, and this is not Coyle's fault, is that reality -- in
the shape of the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War -- has
made the novel's setting extremely outdated. Some of the then-modern
weapons, such as the M1 main battle tank, have been since updated to
M1-A2 standard, older weapons have been retired, and obviously there's
no more Warsaw Pact.
All in all, it's an entertaining read.
I felt justified in reading it, though, since the setting for the book happened to be Germany. As we sped down the Autobahn, I'd occasionally glance out the window to take a look at the land. This made the book all the more immediate to me (so that's what the Black Forest looks like! Whuddya know?), and I finished it in record time. The book, in turn, spawned a phenomenon in my entertainment for the next couple of years. The diagrams in "Team Yankee" were very appealing to my young mind with their grids and topographical lines and symbols representing armored units; I decided to create a game with my pal Kyle Dahlen that utilized those same markings.
The game required:
All of these unspoken rules made the game a tad on the subjective side and not unlike Calvinball in some respects . . .
. . . which is why we quit playing the game around the time one outgrows playing "war." We turned our attention, instead, to other, more age-appropriate pastimes.
What?! You thought we'd play something that wasn't on paper? Hardly.
I remember doing something similar when I was his age (or at least his size . . . como se dice "late bloomer" en espanol?), except it was a novel, not a video game device. As my family traveled around Europe the summer following my 7th grade year, I found myself engrossed in "Team Yankee" by Harold Coyle.
From the Amazon page for the book:
Harold Coyle's Team Yankee: A Novel of World
War III (Presidio Press, 1987) was published a year after Red Storm
Rising's triumphant debut in hardcover, and although it is thematically
similar (Soviet forces invade West Germany after a series of crises
escalate into an all out conventional war), Coyle's approach is very
different from Clancy's. Instead of creating his own possible scenario
for a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact confrontation, he asked for, and received,
permission from British author (and retired General) Sir John Hackett
to set Team Yankee within the scenario created in Hackett's two
"speculative fiction" books The Third World War: August 1985 and The Third World War: The Untold Story.
Team Yankee takes place within a two-week period in an August in
the late 1980s. Since late July, a series of crises precipitated by the
Iran-Iraq war has morphed into a clash between U.S. and Soviet naval
forces in the Persian Gulf region. By August 1, word comes that NATO is
mobilizing and ordering their armed forces, including Bannon and Team
Yankee, to their wartime positions. Soon, the Soviets and their Warsaw
Pact "allies" cross the Inner German Border in force. Team Yankee and
the rest of NATO's forces in West Germany must then fight the invaders
and stop them before the Red Army reaches the Rhine River. After that,
assuming the Soviet attack bogs down, the mission will change from
merely defending territory to taking offensive operations and pushing
the invaders back. The question Coyle poses is, can American soldiers,
using their weapons and tactics against superior numbers of Soviet and
Warsaw Pact soldiers, defeat Russian weapons and tactics?
Readers familiar with Hackett's macrocosmic World War III will know
the big picture, but first-time readers will be turning the pages to
see who wins, who loses, who dies...and who survives in this
outstanding first novel by a true master of the military fiction genre.
The only flaw, and this is not Coyle's fault, is that reality -- in
the shape of the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War -- has
made the novel's setting extremely outdated. Some of the then-modern
weapons, such as the M1 main battle tank, have been since updated to
M1-A2 standard, older weapons have been retired, and obviously there's
no more Warsaw Pact.
All in all, it's an entertaining read.
The game required:
- Grid-lined paper
- Pencils
- Lots of erasers
- A ruler
- Honesty
All of these unspoken rules made the game a tad on the subjective side and not unlike Calvinball in some respects . . .
. . . which is why we quit playing the game around the time one outgrows playing "war." We turned our attention, instead, to other, more age-appropriate pastimes.
What?! You thought we'd play something that wasn't on paper? Hardly.
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