Scorched Earth (1995): Wendell Hicken's Definitive Tank Artillery Game

Rating band: Certified classic · Year: 1995 · Developer/Publisher: Wendell Hicken (freeware) · Platform: DOS · Theme: Multiplayer

Every artillery game traces its lineage back to Atari’s Lunar Lander in some fashion, and Scorched Earth is the entry in that lineage most people actually still play. The core mechanic stays close to its ancestor: set your angle and power, fire, and try to land a hit before your opponent does the same to you. What Scorched Earth adds on top of that simple foundation is depth in nearly every direction at once.

Up to ten players can compete in a single match, mixing humans and computer opponents freely, with a team-play option for anyone organizing something more structured than a chaotic free-for-all. Wind and gravity genuinely affect every shot, shifting with the terrain and weather conditions the game rotates through, so the same power-and-angle input rarely produces identical results twice. Winnings from successful rounds feed back into an economy: over thirty weapons are purchasable, some straightforwardly destructive and some far stranger, Death’s Head and Napalm among the more memorably named options. A sandhog lets you tunnel beneath an opponent’s position and drop them into the resulting hole, which is either the funniest or cruelest weapon in the roster depending on which side of it you’re on.

Fifteen additional accessories round out the loadout options, split across guidance systems like heat-seeking capability, defensive tools such as parachutes and shields, and miscellaneous gear like fuel tanks that let a tank reposition mid-battle rather than sitting fixed in place. None of this is thrown at players all at once; the interface takes real time to learn, and the keyboard shortcuts aren’t especially intuitive on a first sitting. Once internalized, though, the system moves fast.

The computer opponents deserve a specific mention. Rather than a single difficulty slider, Scorched Earth gives each AI profile a distinct personality, and the naming is refreshingly honest about what each one does. Moron plays badly, exactly as advertised. Poolshark deliberately bounces shots off walls and ceilings to land hits from unexpected angles. Spoiler is the one to actually worry about, built to land near-perfect shots with unsettling consistency. Choosing your opponent roster becomes its own small strategic decision before a match even starts.

None of that complexity gets in the way of the game’s central appeal, which is still just two people trading shots until one tank is left standing. Scorched Earth never markets itself as more sophisticated than it needs to be. It calls itself, on its own official site, “The Mother of All Games,” a claim that’s more tongue-in-cheek than literal, but one that’s stuck around precisely because the underlying design has genuinely earned decades of continued play.

How to run it today

Wendell Hicken’s own site hosts a complete package called “Totally Scorched,” containing ready-to-run copies of every official version of the game plus its full manual, available on a pay-what-you-want basis. DOSBox runs the DOS build cleanly on any modern system without further configuration.

Compatibility: DOS (via DOSBox, or Hicken’s own compiled bundle) · Controls: Keyboard, angle-and-power input · Setup difficulty: Low

Legal status

There’s no listing on Steam, GOG, or any other commercial storefront, but the original creator, Wendell Hicken, still personally maintains and distributes the complete version history through his own site as a compiled package. That direct, confirmed continuity from the original author is a stronger position than most freeware titles from this era end up in.

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Liero pushes the same worms-style artillery formula into faster, more chaotic real-time combat. Armor Alley pairs artillery-adjacent combat with resource management across a wider battlefield. Triplane Turmoil brings a similar spirit of physics-based, personality-driven combat to a WWI biplane setting instead of tanks.