Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
skirmish
TedDoesntTalk
I was in college when this game was released. I spent countless hours playing with my roommates.
The game holds up to this day for boys under 12. After that, maybe they expect better graphics, but my experience is that interest wanes.
fatnoah
Yes! Epic Scorched Earth battles happened on my dorm floor. The only thing more competitive was getting into the leaderboard for Mute City on F-Zero.
greggsy
There’s a clone on the iOS marketplace, but it has ads - I’d easy pay $7.99.
There’s probably quite a few retro games that could be rebooted from this era - it has inter generational appeal among older players who grew up in that era. Might work well on the Apple Arcade ecosystem.
staplung
Loved Scorched Earth. Had this fun bug/feature related to the weapons market. Between rounds you used your earnings to buy more weapons for the next round. There was an option to make it a "free market" which meant that the prices would get jacked on the weapons that you bought most often. But - and I didn't know this at the time - the price of an item was represented as a signed int so if you jacked the price high enough (which didn't take long) the price would flip over to a very high magnitude negative number and they'd literally pay you to take the nukes/MIRVs/dirt-bombs/napalm off their hands. Good times.
johnnylambada
One of my favorite games of all time, begin (a text based Star Trek game) has a similar bug where you could warp in the negative direction at infinite speed. I still remember the commands: w 90 -100, f a t. (warp 90 degrees at warp -100, fire all torpedoes!). Assuming the enemy was 270 degrees from you —- you’d fly the ship backwards at them!
JoeAltmaier
I know the guy who wrote that - Tom Nelson. I don't think he knows this bug! I'll let him know (he's rewriting it in a client-server version for multiple players).
fennecfoxen
Bugs aside, the Free Market mode makes for a really nice dynamic where you had to get good at all sorts of different tactics and weapons, instead of just being good at one of them.
LocalH
At my school, I just did the more pedestrian hack of editing the config files to change the prices of the expensive items XD
int_19h
There was a similar game for DOS at around the same time called "Tank Wars", except that one was written for VGA 320x200x256 graphics. I wonder how many people remember it.
JoeAltmaier
I played a tank game 'Wild Metal Country' that my boys and I loved. It was a pre-release we got with another game. I never saw it release though.
anigbrowl
I do! Loved it. My favorite tactic was dropping a dirt bomb and watching my enemies nuke themselves.
b3lvedere
I remember that one, but back in those days i played the crap out of Tunneler. https://dosgames.com/game/tunneler
texasbigdata
Oh man, memories
ethbr0
"Oh crap, he found a tunnel... is that one of mine? It doesn't look like one of mine. Why's he shooting down the tunnel? ... :( it was one of mine."
prawn
Yep, played the crap out of Tank Wars - the AI tank personalities, levels with strong wind, the weapon shop, etc. So good!
gattilorenz
I personally loved the isometric 3D version, Genocide: https://archive.org/details/Genocide_1020
bashinator
There's a full-3d version that is slightly abandoned, but still fun as heck. http://scorched3d.co.uk/
pdw
I always preferred Tank Wars over Scorched Earth
hantusk
Me too!
It had a cheat code, so if you set the power to a certain amount it would shoot through the grass
creativeembassy
…
BRB, installing tank wars again. What was the cheat code?
lgg
800, but it only worked if you were at 100% health.
NoGravitas
I played the hell out of this in like 1991-1993. I really enjoyed figuring out useful combos to bypass shields. Like, instead of attacking your opponent's shields directly, you could dig a hole under them, and fill it with napalm, or send rollers under their magnetic deflector. Most of the people I played against found this kind of thing surprising.
greggsy
I had no idea it was so popular - it certainly was in my household. I remember finally upgrading to a colour monitor. The ‘cheat’ mode of assigning yourself max cash great for practice. Also, firing a MIRV straight up at max power with wrap around walls would spread them out across the field of play. I’m not sure if it was just the copy I had, but there was an NPC called ‘bastard’ that was really tough to beat.
npteljes
Playable online on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Scorched_Earth_1991
sen
This game was such a huge part of my life. It was one of the only games I had for a long time, and I put more hours into it than I could count. I ended up making my own “modern” (winxp) version of it with p2p multiplayer to play with friends (never released it, it was an utter mess), and I’ve made half a dozen other versions over the year to practice different game engines or game dev libraries in various languages. It’s just such an iconic game to me personally.
eurasiantiger
Did you ever make a WebRTC version?
mgdlbp
Similar games others have mentioned aren't necessarily clones of this one--the genre comes from the 1970s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game
> Artillery games are two or three-player (usually turn-based) video games involving tanks (or simply cannons) trying to destroy each other. The core mechanics of the gameplay is almost always to aim at the opponent(s) following a ballistic trajectory (in its simplest form, a parabolic curve).
> Artillery games are among the earliest computer games developed; the theme of such games is an extension of the original uses of computer themselves, which were once used to calculate the trajectories of rockets and other related military-based calculations.[citation needed]
> Early precursors to the modern artillery-type games were text-only games that simulated artillery entirely with input data values. One of the earliest known games in the genre is War 3 for two or three players, written in FOCAL Mod V by Mike Forman (date unknown). The game was then ported to TSS/8 BASIC IV by M. E. Lyon Jr. in 1972. Ported again to [...]
undefined
i_am_proteus
Here's yer needed citation, hoss: http://www.glennsmuseum.com/bombsights/
mgdlbp
I think the needed citation is actually for the statement that the earliest such games were inspired by the practical application, which is indeed well documented.
jschrf
Pet theory: Scorched is just a mod of GORILLA.BAS.
kilbuz
I have been thinking about GORILLA.BAS this entire thread. I don't remember playing Scorched Earth as a kid, but somehow must have been exposed to it to make that connection 30 years later.
My middle school offered a BASIC class in the early 90s, which was my first experience with programming (besides LOGO in elementary school). In hindsight, the teacher was a complete blessing to us, as he 'let' us modify and play GORILLA.BAS and similar BASIC games during our time in class. We thought we were getting away with playing video games in school, but those experiences were setting the seeds for some of our future careers.
Great memories.
SamBam
I remember seeing the source code way too young to really understand any of it, but working out enough to flip a single boolean that controlled the sun. Usually the sun had a happy face, and if you hit the sun with a banana it turned surprised. I was very pleased that I was able to change it so that the surprised and happy faces were flipped.
King-Aaron
I'm glad someone mentioned Gorilla.bas.... many fond memories
ben174
Worms is just a mod of Scorched Earth.
fuzzfactor
Seems to me there was a trend with this on a 3.5 inch floppy in about 2003 or so.
I found the floppy and tried it on a number of different 90's PC's which originally had floppy drives and were still around.
Plus the newer PC's still had the often-neglected floppy connector in use to maintain compatibility.
I could swear that the more powerful the PC, the slower the program ran.
fho
Uh ... That brought up some buried memories. GORILLAS.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS
qbasic_forever
They're both just turn-based pong / tennis for two.
warpspin
You must have majored in topology ;-)
anarticle
This was one of the first games I downloaded from a BBS when I was a teen. Funky bombs forever!
I thought of Wendell Hicken as a programming god. The idea that one person could make a thing like that was amazing to me. I also remember version 1.5, the last version, having a phone shaped button for modem play and being stoked that modem play might come. Super nostalgia, here's an interview with Wendell: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/03/scorched/
The quotes from the tanks were very entertaining to me.
herewulf
Not only are the quotes great but I learned a lot of famous dictators' names as an elementary school age kid. The oddity of the names and their use in Scorched stuck with me for a long time as later in life I learned why these not-so-nice individuals were notable.
MrVandemar
You could add your own quotes to the tanks. My brother and I spent far too long adding one-liners from comic books and action movies to the file.
erellsworth
I played this with friends in middle school. We found the text file that contained the messages that displayed when a player launched an attack or died, and edited them to include Monty Python quotes.
I didn't have a lot of friends, haha.
omniglottal
I, with just the one nerd friend, did the very same - "It's just a flesh wound!"
EvanAnderson
There was a clone game, Scorched Tanks, for the Amiga that was also loads of fun.
LocalH
Came here to say this. I found 'Earth at my school (which was filled with DOS machines, mostly IBM PS/2s), and then learned about 'Tanks through the various resources I had available in the early 90s. I never got to play it in its full glory back then - I only had an A2000 with 1MB chip RAM, so I could only play in 16 colors and (I think) with the half-size maps. It wasn't until UAE that I was actually able to play 64-color full-map 'Tanks like it was meant to be played.
Even still sometimes I fire up Pocket Tanks on my PC, although the overall presentation is a bit watered down compared to Scorched Tanks, the core experience is still there. Would be nice to see a true remake of Scorched Tanks someday.
billpg
I remember the game music of that, "Ari San Crossroad" by "Sidewinder". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvqcW0E0osE
(Dammit brain, I forget all sorts of useful things, but why did I remember that?)
ben174
Pile Driver!
Years of my life sunk into Scorched Tanks. As an Amiga child, I have no MS DOS nostalgia. But I am pretty sure Scorched Tanks was a decent alternative.
Andrew_nenakhov
I never could understand the appeal of later Worms games, Scorched Earth was far superior. It has some minor flaw in it's economy: winning player had so much more money to spend on equipment, that it was very hard for a loser of a round to ever catch up, even with a far superior shooting.
Markoff
Worms had superior graphics, superior UI, funnier weapons, funnier gameplay with cute worms and no economy from what I remember, so players were equal.
Andrew_nenakhov
You also played as a worm. Eew.
SamBam
Worms was my brother and my jam. We would play it all the time, and would give the worms personalities, and sometimes even avoid using a weapon with one worm because another worm was the "expert grenade thrower" or ninja or digger or whatever.
The silliness, combined with the ability to rapidly traverse terrain (but only if you were skillful) was what made it fun, and more like a game than a math problem.
I can't recall whether we felt that the best of the series was Worms 2 or Armageddon, but they were in the sweet-spot of the properly-bendy ninja rope, and cartoony and funny but no weird 3d stuff.
eurasiantiger
IIRC there are settings for the economy.
Also all the shooting/dying quotes can be changed, which was very amusing to us 10-year-olds.
muzani
If the genre was remade today, we'd have Minions instead of Worms.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
I spent so many hours on it. Then I got my first job, and one co-worker I worked closely with was: Wendell Hicken. One day he casually mentioned, I wrote Scorch, was a lot of fun to program. Only then I connected dots.