Scorched Earth (computer game)

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Scorched Earth

Developer(s) Wendell Hicken
Version 1.5
Platform(s) MS-DOS
Release date 1991, 1992, 1995
Genre(s) Artillery game, Strategy game[1]
Mode(s) Single player, Multiplayer (Hotseat)
System requirements VGA monitor
Input methods Keyboard, Mouse, Joystick

Scorched Earth was a popular shareware artillery video game, which is a subgenre of strategy game[1]. The game was developed in the PC-DOS era, originally written by Wendell Hicken (using Borland C++ and Turbo Assembler),[2] in which tanks do turn-based battle in two-dimensional terrain, with each player adjusting the angle and power of his or her tank turret before each shot.

Contents

[edit] Description

Scorched Earth is one of many games in the loose genre of "turn-based artillery games". Such games are among the earliest computer games, with versions existing for mainframes with only teletype output. Scorched Earth, with a plethora of weapon types and power-ups, is considered the modern archetype of its format, on which the popular Worms, Hogs of War and GunBound games are based.

Its slogan, "The Mother of all Games," was coined in 1991, during the Gulf War, after Saddam Hussein threatened the U.S. that if they stepped on Iraqi soil, it would be "The Mother of all Wars."

The game has a wide variety of customization options from gravity and wind to money and meteorite showers, and a similarly large pool of different payloads, allowing for a large amount of entirely different situations.

In addition to the possible in-game changes, the text messages the AI players can display before firing (e.g. "I shall smash your ugly tank!") and before dying (e.g. "Join the army, see the world they said") are read in two plain text files, TALK1.CFG and TALK2.CFG, respectively, free for creative users to change or translate.

The weapons range from small missile rounds to MIRV warheads, and several are often seen in similar on-line games as almost identical versions. All weapons can be upgraded with tracers which allow the player to more accurately adjust the trajectory on their next turn. In addition to conventional warheads, there also are such things as napalm, wildly bouncing bombs and earth weapons, allowing the player to dump dirt on other tanks or to remove ground from beneath them. A tank which is covered with dirt has to shoot itself free and may get damaged in the process; one which falls from too high a level may be destroyed. A variety of utilities, such as shields and tank parachutes, add a tactical side.

The effects of many weapons are highly unpredictable, given that the missiles bounce off the walls, can be manipulated in their flight-path by wind, shields and guidance systems, and often have partially random effects. As the player advances in the game, he can afford more and more weapons, but so can his opponents.

The game can be played against up to nine other human players and/or computer-controlled ones. A broad range of differently skilled player types is offered by the program. If the player-controlled tanks are destroyed before the others, the AI-controlled players continue to battle each other, effectively turning Scorched Earth into a zero-player game.

There is also a similar game from the same era called Tank Wars and another on the Commodore Amiga computer system called Scorched Tanks. Tank Wars was made in 1990 by Kenny Morse, a year before Scorched Earth. Commodore also released a similar version in their educational software catalog called "Artillery".

[edit] Versions

A screenshot of the earliest known version of Scorched Earth, which displays the developer's screen name "Sprig" as the author.
A screenshot of the earliest known version of Scorched Earth, which displays the developer's screen name "Sprig" as the author.

There are several versions known to exist, the earliest being 1.0B (where "B" is presumed to mean "Beta"). Public versions include 1.00, 1.1, 1.2 and lastly, 1.50, which was released in 1995. Versions 1.3 and 1.4 are not known to exist.

Although, graphically, 1.0B looks similar to the later versions, in-game, its menus were completely different. It was also not as feature-rich and contained some different AI class names, such as "Rifleman" and "Twanger" (which may have been changed, as they were also AI class names in the slightly earlier artillery game, Tank Wars).

Starting with 1.00 in 1991, the game became Shareware and was graphically the same Scorched Earth that is widely known of today.

In Version 1.1, more weapons were added, such as Napalm, Smoke Tracers and Liquid Dirt as well as Joystick support and two new death animations among other things. Also in 1.1, a modem icon was added with the intention of including some form of net play in a following version, however, this feature was never implemented.

Nearly a year later, in 1992, version 1.2 was released which added, among other minor things, a new death animation and Synchronous firing mode.

The last version (1.50) was not released until 1995. In 1.5, the registration feature was removed and instead, only a shareware version was released freely while the registered version could only be obtained through a mail order. Purchasing the registered version allowed the player to use the triple-turreted tank and added 25 scanned mountains as well as removing the shareware reminders. New to this version were lasers and SuperMags as well as a couple of new skies and the introduction of scanned mountain ranges.

[edit] Scorched Earth in the Present

Currently, plans for Scorched Earth in some form or another are still being developed.

At the moment, a Totally Scorched CD is being offered through the official site for $20. It contains all versions of the registered game (except for 1.0b). The CD also includes a .MTN builder to create your own Scorched terrains and an HTML version of the version 1.5 manual.[3] Special scholastic site licenses for the game are also available for $40.[4]

There have also been numerous clones made (and are still being made) such as Atomic Tanks [5], xscorch (Linux clone), Scorched 3D, which attempts to modernize the gameplay and graphics, and others such as Charred Dirt that take a different approach by using a unique graphical style. There are also several variants, such as "WarheadsSE" in which the players fire missiles between planets, with the trajectories curving as missiles pass through gravitational fields.

It has also been hinted on December 2005, by the original developer, that more news on the official version may surface soon.[6] He mentioned this again in February 2006 in his blog. [7] This is suspected of being related to a suggested "Scorched Earth project" that the developer has mentioned in his blog in March of 2006.[8]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b MobyGames Summary for Scorched Earth (HTML). MobyGames. Retrieved on 2007-12-31.
  2. ^ "Tools section" of the Scorched Earth FAQ
  3. ^ "Official Scorched Earth web site"
  4. ^ "Scorched Earth FAQ"
  5. ^ "[1]"
  6. ^ MusicIP Forums
  7. ^ "Whicken's blog" February 2006
  8. ^ "Whicken's blog" March 2006

[edit] External links