Scorched Earth

Scorched Earth is a shareware artillery video game. It was released for MS-DOS in 1991, originally written by Wendell Hicken using Borland C++ and Turbo Assembler. Players control tanks to do turn-based battle in two-dimensional terrain, adjusting the angle and power of each tank turret before each shot. Gameplay Scorched Earth is one of many games in the 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. The game has a wide variety of customization options from gravity, wind, money, meteorite showers, and a similarly large pool of different payloads, allowing for a large amount of entirely different situations. The AI players can display text messages before firing, such as "I shall smash your ugly tank!" and before dying, such as "Join the army, see the world they said".