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- Hacker News
- There's also xscorch http://www.xscorch.org/by NoboruWataya
- Pocket Tanks was my ultimate childhood game that I played with my classmates during our computer lab lessons. I believe Scorched Earth was it's inspirationby navigate8310
- There exists 3D version:by r721
- Back in the early 2000s, that scene was HOPPING. A whole bunch of mods were around, some of which seem to have disappeared, particularly Armored Warfare Evolved.
A couple of things happened (at least to my perception): a bug cropped up in the Apocalypse mod where hitting a small shop would cause it to burn for over a minute, disrupting multi-player game play, and on the servers there was an invasion by trolls complete with Nazi avatars, who drove players away (myself included).
- A related page:
Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
- yeah, that's the original. It is better than this remake but no multiplayer.by meshko
- Oh man, we played this in computer lab in high school to pass time after we were done with our assignments. I believe it was a java/flash version though (year 2000/2001)by skeeterbug
- yup, it was a java applet. Stopped working when Java in the browser died.by meshko
- Yup. Hours and hours of this. Along with a Java skiing sim called Motion Playground.by Waterluvian
- for the 25th anniversary (approximately) I vibecoded what i wanted to do for years -- port of the original remake (yes) to JavaScript. Alive again.by meshko
- Doing the lords work, as they say. Thank you for sharing.by alex_anglin
- Great work! People are not realizing to press "start". Possible to add audio notification and/or highlighting the button red when ready?
- Original scorch had a text file with all the sayings the tanks would "shout" out just before firing. Trading those around on BBSes was part of the fun. I still remember, "from Hell's heart I stab at thee!" which is probably from some classic literature that I don't know, lol!by krupan
- Moby Dick. Khan said something at least very similar in ST 2.by ghaff
- I played the hell out of the original DOS game during high school in 1992 (or thereabouts, it's been a while.)by kylemaxwell
- Same! I remember playing this during my Borland C++ for DOS class in school. Good times.by el_duderino
- same, it was a step up from dopewars, but not quite leisure suit larry which one of our friends had
years later i defeated the high score of Stephen Meek and realized with horror Oregon Trail was intended to teach patience not just dysentery damn you MECC!!
by The_Blade - It was fun. Was a bit younger but played it like crazy too on my 286.
Rollers! Lava! It’s like the author started with a simple tank war game and then just threw in every weird little effect they could code as a creative weapon.
There were all kinds of neat hacks.
by api - We played Tank Wars by Kenny Morse, it's from 1990 and preceded Scorched Earth:
https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274
More unhinged fun IMO
by alterom - Early 90s DOS games were certainly quite creative. I mentally draw a dividing line between approximately the start of the era when the first Soundblaster became a common thing to find in affordable home x86 PCs, and early CD-ROM based games were also available (1991-1992), and the December 1993 release of DOOM and everything that came after. Very interesting era in the time frame in between there.by walrus01
- In my first job after graduation in a small company I was talking to the VP of engineering, and he mentioned offhand: "yeah, I wrote Scorch when I was in college". Mind blown.by skirmish
- Must be Wendell Hicken.by reconnecting
- Scorched Earth taught me the concept of software versions. It was the first program that I ever knowingly interacted with more than one point-release of. I had version 1.0, but a friend had version 1.2. My very young mind was boggled by the concept of software being updated.
- I was thinking about this last night. "If it's a different... version.. then it's a different game"
I think Super Mario 2 being what it was really messed me up.
- Mother of all games. Played so much SE when I was younger, one of my all time favs.
This version is ok but I prefer the original which is easy enough to run via dos-box, emulators of similar ilk or even online in a few places:
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Scorched_Earth_1991
https://dos.zone/scorched-earth/
https://www.playdosgames.com/play/scorched-earth
I loved turning the explosion to the max and launching Nukes or Death Head MIRVs and watching the whole screen be annihilated. Despite many clones I've never found one that really captured the feel and fun of the original. I'd love to see a faithful remake that had a larger playing area though.
- Scorched Tanks on Amiga got decently closeby LocalH
- > Despite many clones I've never found one that really captured the feel and fun of the original.
Not trying to be contrarian, but for factual correctness I'm going to point out that Scorched Earth is a clone of an earlier game, Tank Wars. I've played both and I agree that Scorched Earth had more to it, but it wasn't the original.
by Timwi - 9 year old me got my first "hacking" experience out of this game. With the shareware version, you could not select the ultra tank that could shoot 3 bullets for a human, but you COULD if it were the computer player.
The "hack": -start a game with a normal tank VS ultra computer player as p2. -save the game (as a file). -open the game file. -read the ASCII text and just flip which player has which text.
Now, I had my ultra tank.
by rhema - Sounds like Nintendo World Cup and the special field selection trickby rrr_oh_man
- Sounds familiar. As a kid I was bothered that I had to harvest spice or Tiberium (I forgot whether it was Dune 2 or Command & Conquer, but I think the latter).
So I figured out where in the binary save file credits were stored and wrote a small Pascal program that would give me the highest possible credits so that I could focus on base and unit building :).
by microtonal