Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games

[skirmish]

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.

[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.

[vesinisa]

Connected dots - with a MIRV, right?

[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.

[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.

https://dosgames.com/game/tank-wars/

[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

[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

[pdw]

I always preferred Tank Wars over Scorched Earth

[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.

[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 [...]

[i_am_proteus]

Here's yer needed citation, hoss: http://www.glennsmuseum.com/bombsights/

[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.

[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.

[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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Tanks

[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.

[mst]

OMG OMG OMG squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

If you haven't played this, throw them a dollar, play it, then once you realise what utter brilliance it is send them more money to taste.

The only thing whose dueling ridiculosity is on a similar level of amazing is the early Worms games.

[Markoff]

Yeah, first Worms games were much more fun than SE, from what I remember even the SE UI was mess compared to Worms/Lemmings UI/graphics.

[hilltopeagle]

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.

[humaniania]

ShellShock Live on Steam is an excellent modern game in the style of Scorched Earth. It is very well done.

[bovermyer]

It really is. Of all the Scorched-likes in the last thirty years (sigh), ShellShock's my ideal modern version.

[bencollier49]

Great timing. My children have friends around. I am now playing Scorched Earth with four 9-year-olds.

[oh_sigh]

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.

[danielodievich]

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.

[pabs3]

A couple of open source clones of it:

http://www.xscorch.org/ http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/

[jordo]

Scorched was an inspiration for our battle-royale online version: https://rocketbotroyale.winterpixel.io

[platz]

Wow, so it's pay-to-win, huh