Silent Steel is a 1995 submarine simulator computer game by Tsunami Games. It was created during the influx of interactive movies during the 1990s. The game is composed almost entirely of live-action full motion video, with sparse computer-generated graphics depicting external shots of the boat during torpedo attacks and atmospheric fly-bys. More about Silent Steel is available on Wikipedia, MobyGames and the ScummVM Wiki.
This project tries to reverse engineer the game files and implement a barebone interpreter in python to play the game on modern machines (it was originally released as a 16bit executable for Win 3.11) and provide documentation for a full re-implementation of the game (e.g. as a ScummVM engine).
Much of the game is playable, but some parts of the game scripts are still not 100% understood or implemented.
Watch the first 10min 🎬 on Youtube
For a full documentation of the data formats and other details, check out the writeup on my personal website: March 14, 2023: Reverse Engineering the 1995 FMV Game Silent Steel.
At the moment this only supports the promotional disc available at the Internet Archive which is based on the Windows 3.1 MPEG release.
There were many releases of this game, it's not clear whether the later releases (AVI CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and DVD Video) were implemented the same way (DVD Video certainly wasn't).
- Python 3 with nefile
ffplayfrom FFmpeg
- Install requirements:
- Your system will need python3 and ffplay (part of ffmpeg), make sure you have them installed
- Install python requirements:
pip install -r requirements.txt
- Mount promo disc
promo_disco.iso(see link above) - Run main script
play_game.pyand pass mount folder:python3 play_game.py /Volumes/Untitled- When also passing
autothe game is run in "demo mode" and skips asking for user input:python3 play_game.py /Volumes/Untitled auto