Scorched Earth 1.5

The Mother of All Games

Wendell Hicken released Scorched Earth 1.00 in 1991. It already had a choice of skies, including the storm that can damage a player's tank with lightning, even the icon (which seems to have been inspired by the Bang! Bang! icon) was already there. What it did not have, and what caused me to be so version-specific here, is general SVGA support and scanned mountains. 1.2 only supported a single video card beyond VGA, the Western Digital Paradise VGA, and only for 640×480. 1.5 runs in up to 1024×768. Add the scanned mountains and you'll understand that a 1.5 screenshot looks very different from a 1.2 screenshot.

Of course, SVGA or not, rendered mountains or not, Scorched Earth is by far the best known artillery game of them all. It was the direct inspiration for Scorched Tanks, the most popular game of its kind on the Amiga (at least before Worms), and it was the direct inspiration for several remakes in the millennium. In fact, a lot of people aren't even aware that there were artillery games before Scorched Earth!

As for the mother of all games, it's not really a blurb, it's a joke at the expense of Saddam Hussein, who promised US troops the mother of all wars should they dare enter Iraq territory.

Technical Details

Unlike Howitzer, Scorched Earth does not run in SVGA by default, but in 360×480, one of those obscure VGA modes that were usually too much of a nuisance to design pixel graphics for but occasionally used for 3D games and others with graphics generated at runtime; Quake supported it too. In DOSBox it looks rather odd unless you go fullscreen. To run the game in SVGA, you have to select the resolution of your choice from the title screen, and then restart the game. The same goes for the rendered landscapes, by default they will be used only occasionally, but you can change the settings so that they are always used. The menu item is "Percent Scanned Mountains" under "Landscape".

To restart the game, type Ctrl + Q. At any time, this key combination will bring up a little popup menu. From the title screen, you can only quit the game, out of gameplay, you can also get back to the title screen and thus the configuration menu.

System requirements are low, lower than I thought. I played it on a 286 at 640×480 with scanned mountains without problems. The only thing that is really speed dependent is landscape rendering, and that does not affect the game itself.

Artillery Games
Artillery					80		B. Goodson
Ballerburg					87		Eckhard Kruse
Tank Wars					90		Kenneth Morse
Bang! Bang!							David B. Lutton II
Howitzer					93		Randall Spangler