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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
144 comments
[ 173 ms ] story [ 4209 ms ] threadThe game holds up to this day for boys under 12. After that, maybe they expect better graphics, but my experience is that interest wanes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Both are a lot of fun, though!
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.
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.
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.
BTW leap frog bomb was the best.
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.
https://dosgames.com/game/tank-wars/
It had a cheat code, so if you set the power to a certain amount it would shoot through the grass
BRB, installing tank wars again. What was the cheat code?
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
for instance they released same year also Lemmings which has much better UI and feels much more revolutionary and many years younger than SE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Tanks
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.
(Dammit brain, I forget all sorts of useful things, but why did I remember that?)
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.
http://www.xscorch.org/ http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/