Last time I tried this game, I think I had managed to get a hold of the original executable or something: the rate of turn for the turret was tied to CPU cycles. Paying it on a computer about a decade younger than the game made it quite impossible to aim, as the turret would spin several laps if you so much as looked at the arrow key
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.
The difference being that editing the source code was the point of the BASIC examples provided with DOS/QBasic/GW-Basic (they’re there to teach you programming!)
It would be a nice thread on here, to see what people's first hacks were, especially from that era when people were usually just alone and stumbling on these things.
My first was almost kinda similar to GP: me and my cousin played a game called ReVolt, and found that you could make the cars go faster by changing their speed attribute in some text file we found just poking around the game files.
Man we had some good fun with that! It always ended with us boosting our cars so much they flew out of the map
Me as a kid realizing that the rate of fire on the shotgun was directly tied to the number of animation frames in the original Doom. Cue mecha super-extreme gatling shotgun and also mecha super-extreme choppy frame rate.
Ooh the Dungeon Keeper demo actually had all of the characters, just not the art assets. So when I was 11 I modified the ini file and had invisible giants and vampire lords doing my bidding in my dungeon. I was very proud of myself.
Mine was similar but it was the original C&C. Found this sketchy-ass save game editor/mod editor, proceeded to give the little Nod buggies the laser from the obelisk of light to trivialize the single player campaign.
That feeling of being the leetest of leet haxors just from editing some ini settings was pretty glorious.
I recall the INI files of Red Alert were an open book for modding the game mechanics. I had spies with silenced pistols and "tesla cufflinks". It was really fun making crates spawn super frequently. I also vaguely recall making one of the planes into a nuke carpet bombers (fun, but the forced delay each time a nuke went off was a tad annoying).
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.
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.
Don't I remember doom developing pretty organically from wolfenstein and a few other (what would now be called) first person shooters around that time? The name "hexen" is coming to mind too. I would put that whole era as the start of something new, so different from the strategy games and side-scrollers that preceded it. Those first person games were the first time I thought computer games were actually more fun than the console systems, which didn't really have anything similar.
I think the big difference for me, after playing a lot of Wolfenstein 3D, was two things... The system I had it on didn't have the CPU to run wolf3d in something like a full screen size, it was something like a 386SX/20. By the time DOOM came around I had a much more capable desktop. Secondly, wolfenstein 3d was everything on a flat two dimensional plane of grey floor.
DOOM having stairs and up/down movement, and vertical elements to the level design was really revolutionary at the time.
Warcraft II and Doom are both examples of, while not being the first in their genres, defining their genres and inspiring every studio to stop what they are doing and make something in that genre.
Yeah, I remember our high school IT teacher buying a 486sx25 with 8MB and a CDROM ostensibly to explore multimedia in education but mostly to play Myst.
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!!
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.
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.
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)
Neat. The website looks the same (in a good way) from when I remember it over a decade ago - are you the creator of the original java port from back then?
I brought it back to life at one point as a Java Swing app for my kids, but the server side of things was still wonky. I'm glad to see that it's alive again, I had a lot of fun with this in the early 2000s.
Just played a round, think I found a bug - It was down to one other computer and myself. For some reason the power capped at 235, so neither of us could come close to hitting one another.
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 inspiration
I remember the original Scorched Earth being one of the few games that could actually do SVGA graphics at the time.
Most games of the era where 320x240 8 bit 256 colors, I had a 286 with 800x600 SVGA monitor and that game could actually use it although it was only 4 bit 16 color, don't think I ever played the 256 color in the last version.
Last time I tried this game, I think I had managed to get a hold of the original executable or something: the rate of turn for the turret was tied to CPU cycles. Paying it on a computer about a decade younger than the game made it quite impossible to aim, as the turret would spin several laps if you so much as looked at the arrow key
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.
Man we had some good fun with that! It always ended with us boosting our cars so much they flew out of the map
Hitscan weapons for the win.
That feeling of being the leetest of leet haxors just from editing some ini settings was pretty glorious.
Then there were the Duke Nukem 3D CON files...
DOOM having stairs and up/down movement, and vertical elements to the level design was really revolutionary at the time.
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!!
https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274
More unhinged fun IMO
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140210122645/http://www.scorch...
This made my whole day. Thank you.
https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274
Most games of the era where 320x240 8 bit 256 colors, I had a 286 with 800x600 SVGA monitor and that game could actually use it although it was only 4 bit 16 color, don't think I ever played the 256 color in the last version.
Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
http://www.whicken.com/scorch/
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092060)