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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 [...]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Worms had superior graphics, superior UI, funnier weapons, funnier gameplay with cute worms and no economy from what I remember, so players were equal.
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.
I lived playing scorched earth in high school with my friends.. One day, on a bout of nostalgia, I looked long and hard for a good scorched earth like game.
I found shellshock live on steam, I found that it was the closest experience to playing with my friends in high school. We even got to play a couple of rounds over the Internet.
This game is what got me addicted to programming, which basically set the course of my life since I've been doing it professionally for 20 years. I reimplemented a barebones version of it after studying qbasic for a while in an intro to programming course when I was 13, and the feeling of power and amazement it gave me has never really left.
My teacher's response to seeing my game was 'your explosions don't look as good as they do in scorched earth'. He was a charlatan who I already didn't respect so the feedback didn't really affect me, but I can only imagine how crushed I would have been if I was one of those who were naturally respectful of authority...I honestly have no idea what I would be doing, since I don't really have any other useful skills.
Played while growing up in crumbling to pieces Soviet Union in 1991. We'd regularly have 7-10 kids (I think 10 players max it supports) crowding in a little cubby room around our venerable 286 with turbo button. I don't know how we fit around it or how my parents really handled it all but we sure had a lot of fun.
Fast forward to now, and I played this game in an online emulator with my teenage sons, having just as much fun as back then lobby Funky Bombs and Baby Nukes at each other. My children love the Insult-On-Death mode and random wall actions. They have just as much fun with these tiny EGA pixels as with the modern graphics masterpieces like Elden Ring and Halo Infinite.
The 90s DOS games had great taste. They were severely limited by tech and they still managed to make colour and art style choices that fit together beautifully. Heart Of China had some iconic images that still stick with me. Prince of Persia one had great animations for the time it came out.
Every pixel in Scorch's tank pixel art feels so well placed, combined with the quips it's like they all had their own character. The tank selection screen could have had an empty landscape picture behind it, like the main menu, but Whicken chose instead a scrolling background that gave a great sense of movement and amped you up for the coming PC Speaker squealing carnage. Of course you get the easy benefit of the whole design being internally consistent because it's made by one guy, which makes it feel like a cohesive whole.
I would say lot of DOS programs and games were just using cold temperature colors, so it has specific 80/90s cold feel, I think later they started to get warmer and warmer.
At a guess? Most of those early games were made with graphics that would look good if it turns out the guy running it only had an EGA and, therefore, was restricted to a very specific set of 16 colors. It took a while for everyone to upgrade.
More than likely it was one dude working by himself and he did not have the tools/ability to make good artwork. A lot of DOS shareware games have that problem. The gameplay might be interesting but the art is merely ok to fairly bad.
At that time you may have a copy of turboc/watcomc but not a watcom tablet and a copy of paintshop. Also pixel art is a particular artistic skill most people do not have. So you were reduced to poking data into some terrible shareware editor with an awful color palate . I made my own spacewar style game at one point. I was reduced to putting bytes into a file to get the gradients right on the hulls of the ship. Oh and each gradient is stealing a color from my limited palate of 240 colors (16 were reserved, for whatever reason at the time). You want higher res you are now talking VGA. But the trade off was resolution for color. So you could have 640x480 but only 16 colors. Or you could have 320x240 but 256 but a blocky mess. This was when a VGA card might have 1MB of memory total (usually less, unless you paid for something fancy). Throw in page flipping (which you really really want) and you are out of room on the card.
Scorched Earth was more about how many crazy weapons you could make and throw at each other with fun generated effects.
We can now look back at the whole catalog and see what was really good at the time. With collections like eXoDOS. You will find a good 95% of the games are very poor if compared to what you can get today. If you bought something like this on steam today you would be thinking what is up with this junk. Back in the 90s though it was a fun bit of software.
I would say this is it: inexperienced indie developers taking UI inspiration from the software of the day (various audio trackers / windows 1.0) and then copying each other.
AAA games like Lemmings and Wolfenstein 3D were not entirely that way, even if they still used some of the same UI paradigms (think: the hardware detection screen when starting wolf3d, or the action selection in Lemmings)
Also bashing out art is a skill one part learned one part natural. There are lots of little things you can do to make good artwork. There are many tutorials out on YT, which someone in the 90s would have had no access to. Studios could hire 3-4 artists to get everything to look nice. A guy bashing out some software in his bedroom could not hire anyone even if he wanted to. If you are doing it by yourself and you have not had the exp doing it, it will come out very meh. So the budding new artist (by necessity) will copy what they see not understanding the 'why' something looks the way it does. In this case it looks like he resorted to procedurally generated effects and items. Which makes for fun code and compact data (also important at that time).
Yeah, and? Wing Commander was released in 1990 and not everyone could run that either. Back then there was no equivalent of Steam Survey to tell you what everyone had on their PC, and hence people targeted the lowest common denominator in order to ensure sales.
Lemmings was 320x240 resolution like most VGA games at the time allowing 256 colors, scorched earth was one of the first high res games doing 640x480 which only allowed 16 colors if memory serves.
My uncle was the only one with a gaming PC in my family and many many sleepovers were had playing Doom and Scorched Earth all night with my cousin. Nothing quite has captured that magic since then for me.
Elden Ring gets pretty close, but that’s a solo experience more akin to the kind of influence Ocarina of Time had than Doom, I guess.
Scorch is the ultimate gaming experience. In primary school we would always finish computer science classes with a game (or a few) of Scorch. Recently I've shown this game to my kids (10 and 8 years old) and they were really excited to play it. They don't make games like they used to anymore.
Great Game - also - how the fuck were they able to run in this weird VGA/SVGA mode? Something bitplanes, etc. - it wasn't your standard 320x200x256 colors. (Sorry, but back then in Bulgaria the literature on CGI/EGA/VGA was zero, and Ralph Brown's interrupt list only did that much)....
We didn't had access to that book then on, but it was described in various .txt files from demo groups, though I've found them later (like arround assembly 93 or 94 came out)
Man, I played this game so much way back in it's heyday. I loved figuring out all the various tactics, and trying to get hits without just trial and error (actually figuring out, or at least estimating, the math). Any web versions floating around?
I used to play scorch a LOT back in the day -scorch3d is a fun game but somehow it almost feels like a different game to me. If for no other reason than because you don't really have to think about the horizontal plane in regular scorch.
As a kid I played a "paper version" of this on summer camp with my friends using a pencil, eraser, piece of paper and a compass(as in: the drawing tool) because I had no notion of ballistics.
The Werecat Rules Engine is a freely available framework for building and evaluating simple, hierarchical rule structures. Using Java reflection, you can easily plug in your own data and functions to create a highly dynamic rules-based structure with very little coding effort.
While I liked playing it with my cousin I fail to see how is game from 1991 "the mother of all games" when I enjoyed playing plenty other games already in 80s. Also as for the games from 1991 I enjoyed Crystal Caves much more playing it in father's work.
Btw. I find Worms much more enjoyable/funnier, though it's pretty much same concept.
edit: same year was also released Lemmings, which blows graphics/UI of this out of water, SE feels like 80's, Lemmings at least 5-10 years younger, while both were released same year
The game came out around the gulf war: I've always assumed it was a reference to Sadam Hussein's speech about "the mother of all battles" (at the beginning of Desert Storm)
I used to play this with my friends in the high school library, circa 1994-ish. The multiplayer worked pretty well, letting us share one computer and each take turns to play. A fond memory!
I was just talking about Pocket Tanks the other day, for the first time in years... for some reason, the demo version was preinstalled on all of the iMacs in my school district growing up. this got me to thinking, I'm not a Mac guy so I'm not really sure but there's no way it actually shipped with MacOS, right? it must've been put in by a distributor, whoever did the deal with our district. well, on behalf of myself and the rest of my cohort: thank you, that game was dope.
So this game has been done and redone a million times, and is one of the first games I ever played on Bally Astrocade. I believe it was called Artillery? Does that ring a bell for anyone here? We didn't have the actual cartridge, but an eprom that had the binary flashed to it. My dad was into that sort of thing back then.
I enjoyed playing this 3D game inspired by Scorched Earth a while ago. My memory is fuzzy but I believe I was playing it over LAN, too. It was decent entertainment.
I loved this game as a kid. One of the first games I had at my house and didn’t play a a cousin or friends house. I never could understand why my peers liked Worms when this game was better in every way.
This was my first PC game, I haven't had a PC yet, only 1 guy in the whole village had a PC and we were visiting him with like 5 other kids to play this game. So many memories :) Thanks for this game it's great.
I propagated this across half a dozen classroom computers back in middle school, armed with a single floppy disk. It made the span between the end of cross country practice and the time the sports bus took us home a lot more fun.
I didn’t have a PC, but I did have a PlayStation and a Blockbuster card. I rented Worms one weekend, and never returned it. Just told them it was lost, and paid the fine. What a fun genre.
I can't (but I will) tell you how much Scorched Earth rocked in the early 1990's at uni. It was a winnable game for people who sucked at xpilot :) Thanks for the mammaries people ;)
Yes, that's exactly on point. The other half of the meaning relates to the quotes - it's not the videogame that's the "Mother of All Games" - it's war itself (meant cynically, of course). People in power scorching the earth is one of the oldest games.
The press, I distinctly recall, liked to call it. "The mother of all guns" However I am unable to find a citation in the 30 seconds I spent looking for it.
Your side poster red369's more likely correct, as "the mother of all battles" was quite a well-known meme during Gulf War I - especially given the MOAB was designed in the early 00s, which is a while after this game's release.
Pocket Tanks is a later version of this I played with my grandfather on his PC growing up, its available in the app store for both iOS and Android, I play it with my brother all the time.
