Back to News
Advertisement
Advertisement

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

80% Positive

Analyzed from 450 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#tank#played#school#games#wars#high#java#scorched#earth#https

Discussion (18 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

rickcarlino•about 1 hour ago
I did not realize Pocket Tanks was a derivative work.
compiler-guy•40 minutes ago
Tank games like this have a long heritage. Scorch is probably the pinnacle, but I played primitive versions of this all the way back on an Apple ][.
alterom•38 minutes ago
So is Scorched Earth, it's preceded (at least) by "Tank Wars" (aka BOMB.EXE) by Kenny Morse from 1990:

https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274

nodrog3000•about 1 hour ago
Haha, same
kylemaxwell•about 2 hours ago
I played the hell out of the original DOS game during high school in 1992 (or thereabouts, it's been a while.)
walrus01•about 1 hour ago
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.
FireBeyond•35 minutes ago
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.
The_Blade•about 1 hour ago
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!!

el_duderino•about 1 hour ago
Same! I remember playing this during my Borland C++ for DOS class in school. Good times.
alterom•36 minutes ago
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

Cpoll•8 minutes ago
They had a shared ancestor in Tanx. I also remember Tank Wars fondly.
mpyne•19 minutes ago
Yeah, this is the one that ruled my homeroom during last bit of elementary school.
sonar_un•22 minutes ago
I was gonna say, this is totally tank wars!
api•about 1 hour ago
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.

skeeterbug•about 2 hours ago
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)
meshko•about 1 hour ago
yup, it was a java applet. Stopped working when Java in the browser died.
fullstop•about 1 hour ago
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.
skeeterbug•about 1 hour ago
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.
meshko•about 1 hour ago
you probably got damage. If stuck like this, go to menu and select "mass kill"
meshko•about 2 hours ago
for the 25th anniversary (approximately) I vibecoded what i wanted to do for years -- port of the original remake (yes) to JavaScript. Alive again.
alex_anglin•about 2 hours ago
Doing the lords work, as they say. Thank you for sharing.
motgnay•about 1 hour ago
LOL nostalgic
ChrisArchitect•about 1 hour ago
A related page:

Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games

http://www.whicken.com/scorch/

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092060)

meshko•about 1 hour ago
yeah, that's the original. It is better than this remake but no multiplayer.
Forgeties79•about 1 hour ago
Hoooooly hell I totally forgot about this. Talk about dredging up some memories. I don’t think I have thought about this game in literally 20 years.