In 1985, one video game made you telephone for permission to nuke Europe

There are buttons that beg to be pressed. The bigger, redder and more forbidden they look, the more certain it is that somebody will press one just to see what happens. It’s an inherently human stupidity thing. “Don’t press this” will force somebody to press it, even if they know the consequences of doing so would be catastrophic.

So, say you have a button that will do something really bad to your enemy, and it says “Don’t Press This”, you still want to do it. It’s your enemy, right? So the only way to stop your stupidity is to give them a button that will cause a similar disaster for you. You press yours, they will press theirs – and that, my friends, is what the entire fate of the planet hinges on. This is our entire nuclear deterrent, everybody. Hoping and praying that nobody has a muscle spasm and accidentally annihilates the globe. What a time to be alive.

Theatre Europe understood that impulse 40 years ago. It put the fate of the continent beneath your fingertips, then did something no other game before, or, to my knowledge, since has done: it made you leave the computer and make an actual telephone call to a real number before it would let you end the world.

If that sounds like utter madness, it was. In the UK, long-distance phone calls were not cheap in the 1980s, and calling a number in Coventry from Manchester was unusual. I mean, what am I going to tell my parents when the bill comes in – ‘Sorry Dad, I needed the nuclear launch codes’.

This was not a bit like a modern game sending a code to an app. There was no internet at the time, just Britain’s own little-known online world, Prestel and Micronet 800, no QR code and no second screen. In 1985, it meant walking over to the family telephone, dialling the Coventry number 0203 668405 and listening to an answerphone message. The line was available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Once you had initiated a nuclear launch, the game gave you 30 seconds to get the authorisation code. As I say, madness.

At the other end was not a cheerful hint service either. Once the call connected you were greeted by air-raid sirens, the sounds of war, explosions and a crying baby for good measure. Once the noise had faded, a voice delivered its verdict: “If this is really what you want…” The nuclear authorisation code was MIDNIGHT SUN – which has since become an album title for pop star Zara Larsson – I googled it and everything.

I remember the sirens and the crying baby clearly. They were there in the background while I waited for the launch code, turning an ordinary telephone call into something a bit frightening. Looking back, though, part of me wishes PSS had made the recording colder and more military. A real nuclear command line would not have babies crying behind it. A calm voice formally authorising the destruction of Europe might have been quieter and more mentally damaging.

Then you returned to your Commodore 64, Amstrad or whatever you were playing it on, typed it in and decided whether millions of imaginary people were about to die. It was not too late, you could pull back.

Plenty of games from the 1980s are fondly remembered because they were colourful, fast or just insanely impossible to beat. Theatre Europe lingers for a different reason. It took a subject children heard about on the news, saw on protest badges and had perhaps recently endured in the BBC’s Threads, and placed it inside the same machine that also housed Jet Set Willy and Daley Thompson. It did not ask you to save the world; it was asking you if you had the balls to destroy it.

Britain in the 1980s – nuclear nervousness

To understand why Theatre Europe could feel quite so unsettling in 1985, it is worth remembering just how close nuclear war seemed to everyday life in Britain during the early 1980s. Trust me, it felt close. I used to have a recurring nightmare about it as a kid.

The Cold War had heated up again, American cruise missiles were being stationed at RAF Greenham Common, CND marches drew huge crowds, and the government’s infamous Protect and Survive public information campaign calmly explained how to improvise a nuclear shelter inside your home, as though a few doors propped against a wall might somehow save you from Armageddon.

Then, in September 1984, the BBC broadcast Threads, Mick Jackson’s relentlessly bleak drama about a nuclear attack on Sheffield and the collapse of British society that followed. There were no heroic survivors wandering through picturesque ruins; people burned, starved and died of radiation sickness as civilisation disintegrated around them. For a generation of British viewers, Threads was nightmare fuel on an almost industrial scale. (quick fact, it’s being remade by the people who created Adolescence, Warp Films – I’m sure that will be a laugh).

Less than a year later, Theatre Europe arrived on home computers and effectively asked players the same terrifying question that had been hanging over the country for years: what happens if somebody actually presses the button? And, what if that person was you?

The next war in Europe

Theatre Europe was created by Coventry-based Personal Software Services, better known as PSS, and designed around the work of veteran wargamer Alan Steel. It first appeared on the Commodore 64 in 1985, with versions for machines including the Amstrad CPC, which was my weapon of choice, Atari 8-bit and ZX Spectrum following across its original run. PSS marketed it as the “ultimate conflict simulation”, which sounds like standard box-copy boasting until you see how seriously the studio treated the material.

The game covers the first 30 days of a fictional war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. You can command either side or watch the computer play itself. As NATO, your job is to prevent the occupation of West Germany (Google it, kids). As the Warsaw Pact, you must take it and break the opposing alliance. The battlefield stretches from Portugal to Crimea and from Finland to Yugoslavia (again, Google), compressed into an 8-bit map of borders, capitals, mountain ranges and coloured military units.

It is a proper turn-based wargame, but an unusually approachable one. Each day moves through a series of phases. Armies are repositioned, attacks are ordered, damaged units rebuilt and aircraft distributed across duties such as air superiority, reconnaissance, counter-air operations and interdiction. Supply lines are key. Reinforcements have to get to where they are needed. Sending aircraft deep behind enemy lines may disrupt a railway or delay fresh troops, but it can also be misread as the beginning of something much worse.

PSS also tried to lure players who would normally run a mile from a page of military abbreviations. Optional action sequences let you guide missiles towards aircraft, helicopters and tanks in a simplified, Missile Command-like battle. Your performance affected the wider result, although serious armchair generals could switch the arcade sections off entirely.

How very 1980s. Must. Shoot. Something. It’s perhaps surprising that a platformer level didn’t sneak in with your little chaps trying to get the warhead to the top of the bomb. I might vibecode a sequel. Yet it gave Theatre Europe a pace and accessibility that many contemporary wargames lacked. You didn’t need to spend an evening pushing tiny counters around a hex map before anything happened. The front began moving almost immediately you started the game, and the red mass to the east looked horribly capable of swallowing West Germany.

Above it all sat the ominous DEFCON indicator. DEFCON 5 meant that, for the moment, the war was conventional, the way we currently like our wars. DEFCON 1 meant it very much was not. Booo.

Your call is important to us..

Maybe without the need to make the phone call, Theatre Europe would have slipped quietly into history. There was still enough controversy around it. British newspaper The Sun took a few moments from doing the things The Sun was infamous for in the 1980s to start a hate campaign against the game. Even CND said it was horrific to turn nuclear war into entertainment. So maybe we would have remembered some of the controversy. Not to the same level, though. Getting slated by The Sun is not a USP, picking up your phone was.

When a player first requested a strategic nuclear launch, Theatre Europe displayed the number and allowed 30 seconds to obtain the code. Once entered, it unlocked a nuclear menu for the rest of that game. The call was real, and the recording was intentionally designed to be upsetting. PSS co-founder Richard Cockayne later explained that the answerphone message was there to spell out the real-life consequences of ordering a strike.

Today, we are probably more blasé about wars as things kick off everywhere, seemingly all the time. In the 1980s, however, Europe hadn’t seen much conflict since the defeat of Hitler, and it was on edge. I don’t think the phone call would have as much effect today as it did back then.

However, the hotline was not really copy protection and ringing it was not the only way to discover the password. On the surviving PSS map/poster, a small box near the Warsaw Pact reinforcement table is clearly labelled “Nuclear Authorization Code”. Beneath it, in large type, are the words MIDNIGHT SUN. Players who studied everything in the box could bypass the call completely.

PSS was not trying to charge for a hint or verify that you owned the game with some kind of elaborate copy protection. The call was designed to be a layer of friction: a deliberate pause between wanting to see the nuclear sequence and being permitted to cause it. It extended Theatre Europe out of the screen and into the player’s house. The family landline became part of the command-and-control system. The movie WarGames had arrived a couple of years earlier. Here, you were kind of taking on a little bit of the David Lightman character.

It is easy to forget how strange that felt before games routinely spilt into websites, companion apps and alternate-reality marketing campaigns. A computer could order you to ring a real location, but it could not know whether you obeyed. Theatre Europe relied on you playing along. For half a minute, a domestic telephone in a hallway or living room became a hotline to your very own extinction-level event.

Once you had the code, it didn’t simply unlock one spectacular big boom animation either. It opened a set of increasingly awful choices. You could return the missiles to standby. You could order a single strategic launch against an enemy city or formation, knowing retaliation was likely. Or you could select a full-scale attack with the almost cuddly name FIRE-PLAN WARM PUPPY. The manual’s warning was blunt: the enemy reaction would be extreme. I’ll refer you back to what happens when both idiots have similar buttons at the top of the page.

There was also a reflex system designed to answer an incoming strike automatically while the enemy missiles were still in the air. It matched one launch with one launch and a fire plan with a fire plan. The catch was that it could not distinguish a nuclear missile from a chemical one. A gas attack could therefore provoke an automatic nuclear response without the player making another decision. This is not a world away from systems we still have in play today. If you want to lose some sleep, check out Kathryn Bigelow’s excellent House of Dynamite on Netflix, or read Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobson – remind me why I have nightmares about this stuff.

That is the heart of Theatre Europe. Nuclear weapons are available, powerful and tactically tempting, but the option to use them is a poor one. Every system built to make deterrence safer introduces another route to catastrophe. Every escalation gives the other side a reason to escalate again.

A game with a conscience

Released a year after Threads first reduced Sheffield to radioactive ruin on British television, Theatre Europe arrived when nuclear war felt like it could come in the next few minutes. Cruise missiles had come to Greenham Common. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was visible in British streets and popular culture. Only two years earlier, NATO’s Able Archer exercise had helped create a war scare whose full danger was not yet publicly understood but very much apparent. Kids could reasonably wonder whether adulthood was going to arrive before the missiles did. I know I certainly did. I’d imagine I will have that dream again tonight after all of this.

PSS researched the game accordingly. The manual’s bibliography ranges from General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War and Jane’s annuals to SIPRI material, government publications on chemical and nuclear effects, NATO and embassy leaflets, and Sanity, CND’s magazine. Contemporary reports say the team sought information from both the Ministry of Defence and the Soviet embassy in London.

The resulting figures gave Steel and the team a nasty surprise. When the computer was allowed to run the conventional war by itself during development, the Warsaw Pact repeatedly won by an overwhelming margin. NATO was left with the choice its real-world doctrine had long contemplated: accept defeat in Europe or use nuclear weapons. PSS eventually buffed the numbers to give NATO a fighting chance, because a simulation in which one side always won would not make much of a game.

It is difficult to imagine a more sobering playtest. The team had started by building a war game and ended up with a machine that repeatedly recommended Armageddon as the West’s only real ‘escape’ from conventional defeat.

The manual does not hide the developers’ unease. It says that targeting the computer’s nuclear strikes caused sleepless nights, as did knowing somebody, somewhere, was doing the same work for real. Its discussion of automated retaliation concludes that handing nuclear launch authority to a computer shows there are “no limits to human insanity”. Before the instructions even begin, the program is dedicated to the people of the world in the hope that its game is never played for real. So far, we have just about managed it.

Even its music makes the point. David Dunn’s title-screen arrangement of Give Peace a Chance bookends a game filled with gas, burning cities and electronic warning tones. It could have seemed glib, and at least one German review considered it cynical, but subtlety was hardly the order of the day. Theatre Europe wanted the player to understand that reaching the nuclear ending was not winning with better weapons. It was failure with a mushroom cloud.

Bad taste or a warning?

Not everybody accepted that defence. Theatre Europe attracted criticism from CND and The Sun, while Boots and John Menzies, both big sellers of games in the UK, declined to stock it. Cockayne said CND had accused the company of bad taste without properly examining the product. In West Germany, the game was placed on the index of media considered harmful to young people in 1986; that restriction was not removed until 2011.

The packaging undeniably knew how to attract controversy. A game advertised around the possibility of launching chemical and nuclear weapons was always going to generate headlines, whatever its moral. PSS could sincerely oppose nuclear war and still understand that outrage sold software.

Yet the claim that Theatre Europe glorifies war is difficult to sustain once you play it. Its nuclear scenes are not rewards. Cities disappear, the exchange spreads and the population of Europe pays for your experiment. Even a limited strike makes the next one easier to justify. The mechanical lesson is the same one WarGames delivered in cinemas: nuclear war is a contest in which the smartest move is to avoid beginning it.

The specialist press largely understood. ZZAP! 64 praised the game for actively discouraging nuclear war and described it as a strategy game with a conscience. Reviewers repeatedly called it chilling, alarming and unusually accessible. It went on to win Strategy Game of the Year at the 1985 Golden Joystick Awards, an impressive achievement for something that asked joystick owners to study reinforcement schedules and contemplate mutually assured destruction. I wish I had been old enough to review it, rather than just play it.

Thirty seconds you did not forget

Theatre Europe eventually received a 16-bit successor, Conflict: Europe, in 1989. By then, the political landscape was moving faster than any programmer could follow. The Berlin Wall fell that November, the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991, and the scenario that had seemed frighteningly immediate became, for a while, the stuff of history books.

As for the phone line – that’s long dead. Emulated versions can still be played, and MIDNIGHT SUN is now one search away – although you might get redirected to Spotify, but typing the code into a browser is not the same as making that call. The result was something designed to make you feel ashamed of what you were about to do. I have hunted high and low, but don’t believe any known copy of the recording exists today

Modern strategy games often treat nuclear weapons as endgame toys: expensive, spectacular and satisfying to deploy. Theatre Europe made them feel what they are – contaminating. The power was yours, but using it poisoned the game as surely as it poisoned the map. Even its automatic safety system could mistake one kind of horror for another and end civilisation before a human being had time to intervene.

That is why a relatively austere 8-bit wargame still produces such vivid memories. It did not have cinematic actors or hours of recorded dialogue. It had coloured circles, blocky maps and a telephone number in Coventry – could it get more bleak? (Soz Cov!) From those pieces, it built one of the most effective fourth-wall breaks of the home-computer era.

The most important option in Theatre Europe was not FIRE-PLAN WARM PUPPY, the single strategic launch or even standby. It was the option to put the receiver down, leave MIDNIGHT SUN untyped and try to win without ending everything.

Forty years later, that’s still the right decision. I kinda wish current world leaders had to listen to that recording before they go to bed each night.

The post In 1985, one video game made you telephone for permission to nuke Europe appeared first on The Escapist.