Carrier Command

Carrier Command is played as a real-time strategy and simulation game with the player having direct control over the friendly vehicles.

Except for the Commodore 64 version, Carrier Command uses filled-in vector graphics to create a three-dimensional view of the game world. The carrier and the vehicles it carries have full 360-degree freedom of rotation. In the Commodore 64 version, the gameplay is from a top-down 2D viewpoint.

The game is set in the near future, where a team of scientists have developed two robotic aircraft carriers to colonise an archipelago of sixty-four islands. Unfortunately, the more advanced carrier falls into the hands of a terrorist organization, and they plan to conquer the archipelago for their own evil ends. It is the player's job to use the less advanced carrier to colonise the islands and destroy the enemy carrier.

After completing the 8-bit conversions of Starglider for Rainbird, the Leeds-based studio Realtime Games was invited to pitch an original title for 16-bit computers. A brainstorming session at Rainbird's London offices produced "a half-page outline of a game based on an aircraft carrier attacking an archipelago of islands." Programmers Ian Oliver and Graeme Baird expanded that outline into a hybrid of real-time strategy and vehicle simulation that would eventually become Carrier Command.

Realtime developed the first version on the Atari ST, then parallelised work on the Amiga, MS-DOS and Macintosh, while Andy Onions single-handedly created the Z80 ports for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. Because C proved too slow for 3-D polygon rendering on 8 MHz 68000 machines, the entire engine-terrain generation, flight dynamics and AI was written in 68000 assembly. Oliver later recalled that the two-person core team "worked seven days a week and slept under our desks" and that development "took a lot longer than planned" as they struggled with draw-order glitches and performance bottlenecks.

The Games Machine awarded the Atari ST and Amiga versions 98% and 97% respectively and ranked Carrier Command the #1 game of 1988. ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment) scored the PC version 965/1000, while Zzap!64 magazine awarded the Amiga release 92%. The game was ranked the 15th best game of all time by Amiga Power.

Computer Gaming World in 1988 praised the game's blend of strategic and tactical play, recommending it as an improvement over Starglider. A 1992 survey in the magazine of wargames with modern settings gave the game two and a half stars out of five, describing it as a "futuristic arcade game", and two 1994 surveys gave it two stars. The ZX Spectrum version was awarded a "Crash Smash" with 97%, and was awarded 94% by Your Sinclair, and was placed at number 12 in the Your Sinclair official top 100.

Carrier Command was followed by Battle Command, where the player controls a tank.

Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising (2001) was inspired by Carrier Command and has many similarities.