Chernobyl: Nuclear Power Plant Simulation (1987)

Chernobyl: Nuclear Power Plant Simulation (1987), developed and published by Cosmi Corporation for Commodore 64. Cosmi is, from everything I can find, a pretty shoddy developer, which makes this title all the more peculiar. It’s an incredibly dry simulation of a nuclear power plant, opening with a short essay about the history of nuclear power and the careful balance of clean energy vs meltdown. The player enters commands to view different parts of the facility, mainly the control rods and various gauges. The opening walls of text contain a guide on practically every command as well as procedures for starting up, monitoring, and shutting down the plant. This is a very involved game; I said before that SimHealth tried to capture the stress of legislating health care, well, this game does the same, except the looming threat is in its very title. The message is clear: This stuff is complicated. It’s worth noting the frankly unnerving soundtrack, by which I mean the constant low hum of machinery. At first, I thought that my C64 emulator was just being really CPU intensive for some reason, and then I realized that that is the sound of thousands of lives being in your hands. I can’t think of any other programs about simulating a nuclear power plant, and I think that, for what it is, it’s quite a good display of the labors of such a task. I wouldn’t know, though. Who do I look like, Homer Simpson?