MacArthur's War (1990): Commanding the Korean War Through SSG's Battlefront System

Year: 1990 · Developer/Publisher: Strategic Studies Group (SSG) · Designer: Roger Keating · Platform: DOS · Theme: Historical

General Douglas MacArthur’s name carries a specific weight in American military history, and the Korean War is where a lot of that weight gets tested. It was one of the first times the United States intervened between two rivals under the deliberately vague label of a “police action,” at a moment when the world was still working out what the Cold War actually meant in practice: the Soviet Union’s influence spreading, Korea split cleanly between a communist north and a capitalist south. Strategic Studies Group built what stands as one of the more respected wargames covering that conflict, using their established Battlefront system to put players directly into the command chair.

The Battlefront engine’s defining choice is what it withholds. You get eight scenarios drawn from real historical battles, and the system lets you re-enact them with genuine tactical realism, but it doesn’t hand you full control over your troops. Orders can go wrong. Units can react unpredictably. That’s a deliberate simulation of the “fog” that actually shaped the real war, rather than a limitation the design apologizes for; Battlefront treats uncertainty as the point, not a bug to route around.

The Chipyong scenario sets the tone early. Playing it means understanding exactly what MacArthur was up against: by early 1951, when this battle takes place, he’d already ordered the 8th Army to retreat and was pushing President Truman to consider nuclear weapons against Chinese forces. Against that backdrop, your job is comparatively modest and brutally difficult in practice — hold out with South Korean troops until cavalry support arrives roughly three-quarters of the way through a 43-turn engagement. The historical record suggests the South Korean forces were actually the aggressors in this fight, which the scenario leaves you to judge for yourself rather than resolving with a tidy narrator’s verdict.

Every other scenario holds to the same standard of difficulty, and the Chosin Reservoir battle in particular is flagged as extremely tough even by the rest of the game’s demanding curve. That consistency is exactly what SSG’s wargames were known for: nothing here is padded out or simplified to make the roster look bigger than it is. The tradeoff is accessibility: this is squarely a game for players who already want a genuine operational-level challenge, not an introduction to the genre for people who haven’t built up tolerance for a Battlefront-style learning curve.

What separates MacArthur’s War from a simple map-and-counters exercise is how directly the historical pressure feeds into the scenario design. Knowing that MacArthur was arguing for nuclear escalation while your ROK troops are barely holding a line gives the Chipyong scenario a weight that a generic wargame scenario wouldn’t have; the strategic desperation of the actual campaign is baked into what you’re being asked to accomplish on the map, not bolted on as flavor text before the turns start.

How to run it today

The DOS release runs cleanly in DOSBox on any current system. Mount the game directory and launch the executable directly; no source port or additional configuration is needed to get an accurate, stable run of the original Battlefront engine.

Compatibility: DOS (via DOSBox) · Controls: Keyboard, turn-based command entry · Setup difficulty: Low

Legal status

Strategic Studies Group continues to exist as a company, but no confirmed current storefront lists MacArthur’s War specifically for sale. That leaves its status genuinely unclear. A studio still operating doesn’t necessarily mean every title in its back catalog is being actively sold, and this one shows no sign of currently being one of them.

If you liked this, try

Gary Grigsby’s War in Russia and Panzer General II, both part of this collection, offer the same operational-wargame density from the World War II side of the mid-century conflict spectrum. Conflict: Korea, if you can track it down, sits closest to this game’s actual subject matter and scale.