As the Royal Navy submarine H.M.S. Mercury 332 patrolled the icy waters of the South Atlantic, the commander read his orders: Sink the Argentine flagship Frey Bentos. After sighting the flagship and calculating its speed and distance, he fired a torpedo.
The opening salvo in the battle for the Falkland Islands? No. The commander was merely playing Obliterate, a video computer game designed by Mercury 332, an electronic publishing company based in Manchester, England, that offers the game as part of the information it supplies through Prestel, a videotext information and entertainment service in eight countries, including the U.S.
Obliterate, a game in which a submarine and a battleship match tactics at sea, had already been available for many months. When the Falkland Islands crisis began to heat up, Mercury 332 assigned specific nationalities to the warships "to make the game more topical and fun."
It proved to be a great hit with viewers, but Labor Party M.P. Bob Cryer protested that Obliterate encouraged people "to see war as nothing more than a game." Mercury 332 has decided to remove Obliterate from its list of programs, even though many subscribers seemed ready to go down with their colors nailed to the screen.