these movements, sending its mobile forces first one way, then the other, never actually making contact. Another strategy is to keep flanking forces behind a spearhead, which the AI would attempt to block. This results in the computer forces clumping up in front of the Germans, allowing the wings to move in once motion was difficult. Players exploited another bug in the first version's game engine. Since the AI calculates its moves while the user enters orders, reducing the amount of time the user takes to plan their own moves reduces the quality of the computer response. Repeatedly pressing prevents the computer from pondering and neither the player nor computer does anything, avoiding combat during the winter and allowing the player to break out during spring with full-strength units. Development After writing Tanktics, which simulated German and Soviet tank battles during World War II, Crawford wrote the first version of what he called Ourrah Pobieda (Russian for "Horray, Victory!") in May and June 1979 on a Commodore PET using Commodore BASIC. The game was at the time a division-level simulation of combat on the Eastern Front. He described the initial version as "dull, confusing, and slow", and did not return to the project for 15 months. After he began working for Atari, in September 1980 he saw a fellow employee demonstrate smooth scrolling in a text window on an Atari 8-bit and realized the technique's potential for a war game. By December he produced a smoothly scrolling map of Russia, in January 1981 produced a written description of the design for what he by now envisioned as a "48K disk-based game with fabulous graphics" written in assembly language, and began working 20 hours a week during nights and weekends to produce a demonstrable game by the Origins Convention in July. Crawford first playtested the game in May and again found it disappointing. To simplify the project, he reduced the game's scope from the entire 1941-1945 campaign to just the first year; introduced zones of control to reduce the number of units and the burden on the computer's artificial intelligence; and added logistics, which permitted encirclement. Crawford also found that the game fit into 16K RAM instead of 48K, and maintained the size. He distributed the game to other playtesters in June, demonstrated a playable version at Origins, then further refined the game for six weeks by fixing bugs and adjusting