Game Classification

The player controls a crewman on the USS Sea Moss, a nuclear submarine patrolling the icy waters of the North Atlantic. While conducting routine maintenance, the player finds themselves alive, alone, in a sealed hatchway, following an underwater gas attack by a treasonous saboteur. The player's Pyrrhic goal is to find and neutralize the saboteur and scuttle the vessel to prevent its military and technological secrets from being recovered by an enemy power. But the first problem is surviving escaping from the hatchway into the gas-filled interior...

The game's interface is via an appropriately claustrophobic windowed text system not dissimilar to Adventure International's, with certain screen areas indicating location, exits, inventory, and player input. The player communicates with the computer by using two-word VERB NOUN phrases. Though the interface is primitive, the game is still more sophisticated than Moriarty's earlier Adventure in the Fifth Dimension, which was written in BASIC -- this game employs machine language. Soon after, Moriarty would be working at Infocom.

This game was published in issue #5 of A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing as type-in code, and was inspired by cover artwork for a long-dormant submarine arcade game hanging in the magazine's offices. "Feelies" appearing photographed in the magazine helped in the solution of some of its puzzles. [source:mobygames]

Distribution : Retail - Commercial
Platform(s) : Atari 800

Links

• http://www.mobygames.com/game/crash-dive_/