Tank Wars

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Tank Wars title screen

Tank Wars in-game screen shot

Tank Wars (also known as BOMB because of the filename) is an artillery game developed in 1986 by Kenneth Morse, a year before Scorched Earth, and was quite popular at that time; yet, surprisingly, not many people today know that this game appeared before Scorched Earth (and hence that Scorched Earth was inspired by Tank Wars, and not the other way around).

There is also a similar game on the Commodore Amiga computer system called Scorched Tanks, written by Michael P. Welch (who also made Pocket Tanks). The things that stand out in this game compared to Scorched Earth is that Mr. Stupid is funnier, The Twanger AI when bouncing walls are turned on, the sound effect of the nukes, and the colorful backgrounds that also animate/move in newer 2.5x and later versions. Scorched Palm is the version designed for the Palm OS.

Tank Wars is 320x200 256 colors only. It prefers 286 and 386 computers, but is playable on 486s and slow Pentiums as well. Versions 2.0 and 2.5 seem to be optimized for the 286 PS/2 computers that were handed out to schools in 1988-1991. Versions 3.0 and 3.2 are optimized for slower 386 machines. Tank Wars runs under Windows XP, but the game runs almost unplayably fast and there are graphical glitches that prevent one from seeing the angle/power settings.