It was 1991. You probably had a bulky CRT monitor that hummed with static and a PC speaker that could only beep or boop. But when you loaded up Scorched Earth, that little speaker suddenly sounded like the end of the world. Developed by Wendell Hicken, this shareware title wasn't just another clone of Artillery. It was "The Mother of All Games." That wasn't just marketing fluff; it was literally the subtitle on the loading screen.
Honestly, the premise is dead simple. You’re a tank. Your buddy is a tank. You’re both sitting on a jagged, procedurally generated mountain range, and you want to blow each other into digital dust. You adjust your power, you nudge your angle, and you pray the wind doesn’t shift. If you grew up in the 90s, you didn't need a $3,000 GPU to have a blast. You just needed a floppy disk and a few friends willing to huddle around a single keyboard.
The Chaos of the Arsenal
What made Scorched Earth stand out from its predecessors wasn't the graphics—it was the sheer, ridiculous variety of the weapons. Most games gave you a standard shell. Maybe a big shell if they were feeling spicy. Wendell Hicken went absolutely nuclear.
You had the "Death's Head," which looked like a terrifying skull and basically deleted a chunk of the map. Then there was the "Dirt Clod," a weapon that didn't kill people but buried them alive under a pile of earth. Getting buried was arguably more frustrating than dying. You’d sit there, round after round, trying to blast your way out while your friends laughed at your misfortune. It was psychological warfare.
The economy added another layer. You earned cash for kills and survival, then spent it in a shop between rounds. Buying "Parachutes" was a must unless you wanted to die from a fall after the ground beneath you vanished. "Auto-Defense" systems and "Batteries" to move your tank transformed the game from a static shooter into a tactical nightmare.
Shields and the Sandbag Meta
Defense was just as complex as offense. You could buy heavy shields to tank a hit, or "Mag Deflectors" that literally warped the trajectory of incoming shells. I remember playing games where someone would fire a "MIRV"—a multi-warhead missile—only for it to hit a deflector and come screaming back at the person who fired it. Total karma.
The game even featured "Napalm" and "Liquid Dirt." The physics were primitive but surprisingly effective. If you hit a peak with liquid dirt, it would flow down the slopes, filling valleys and trapping players. This wasn't just a shooting game; it was a terraforming simulator where the goal was murder.
Why Wendell Hicken Changed Everything
Before Scorched Earth, most "artillery" games were dry. They were math exercises. Hicken realized that people didn't want to solve for $X$; they wanted to see things explode in colorful ways. He built the game in Borland C++ and released it as shareware, which was the 1990s version of "Free to Play," except you actually owned the thing.
The customization was insane for the time. You could change the gravity. You could make the walls "rubbery" so shells would bounce like bouncy balls, or "wraparound" so a shot fired off the right side of the screen would reappear on the left. You could even set the "Talk" frequency, where tanks would spout little taunts like "See ya!" or "Eat lead!" right before an impact.
It was a social experience. Long before Discord or Xbox Live, we had "hotseat" multiplayer. You’d gather three or four people, everyone would pick a color, and you’d take turns. The tension was real. Watching a "Funky Bomb" slowly drift toward your tank while you were out of shields was a special kind of agony.
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The Technical Legacy and the Clones
A lot of people think Worms started the whole "destructible terrain" genre. Not even close. Team17’s iconic franchise owes a massive debt to Scorched Earth. While Worms added cute characters and humor, the core mechanics—the wind, the power bars, the terrain deformation—were all refined by Hicken first.
Even modern hits like ShellShock Live are basically high-definition love letters to this 1991 classic. But there’s something about the original's VGA palette that just feels right. It was gritty yet colorful.
The AI Personalities
If you didn't have friends (or they got tired of you blowing them up), you played against the AI. Hicken didn't just give them difficulty levels; he gave them personalities. "Cuddly" was easy. "Shooter" was a marksman. "Poolshark" would try to use the bounce mechanics to hit you from weird angles.
The "Moron" AI was particularly famous for frequently blowing itself up. It made the world feel lived-in, even if the "world" was just a bunch of 2D pixels and some jagged lines representing mountains.
Why It Still Works Today
You can still play Scorched Earth in a browser via DOSBox, and honestly? It’s still fun. It bypasses the "uncanny valley" of modern graphics by leaning into its abstract nature. A tank is a rectangle. A mountain is a line. The explosion is a circle of pixels. Your brain fills in the rest.
The gameplay loop is perfect.
- Buy gear.
- Adjust for wind.
- Fire.
- Watch the chaos.
- Repeat.
It’s a rhythm that doesn't age. There’s no battle pass. No loot boxes. No "always-online" requirement. Just you, your tank, and a weapon called the "Sand Bag" that you're going to use to ruin someone's afternoon.
Getting Started with Retro Artillery
If you want to experience this piece of history, don't just look at screenshots. You need to feel the frustration of a 90-mile-per-hour headwind ruining your perfect shot.
- Find a DOSBox emulator: This is the easiest way to run the original
.exefile on modern Windows or Mac systems. - Play with others: The AI is fine, but the game shines when you have a human opponent to gloat over.
- Start with the "Registered" version: If you can find the v1.5 files, you get the full range of weapons, including the fabled "Triple Neutrons."
- Watch the wind: It’s the biggest killer in the game. Most beginners ignore the little flag at the top of the screen. Don't be that guy.
- Invest in Parachutes early: Nothing is more embarrassing than surviving a direct hit only to die because the ground underneath you vanished and you fell ten pixels.
Scorched Earth remains a masterclass in game design. It proved that you don't need a complex story or high-fidelity assets to create something addictive. You just need some math, some mountains, and a lot of high explosives.