As a kid, my older brother and I would head up to the local arcade and play Atari’s primitive tank combat game. This was a long time before Doom, a time when simple gray-scaled graphics sufficed.
I spent a long time creating a clone of Tank when I received my first computer, the TI-99/4A. It was one of my first real programs. Very blocky, very slow, and a whole lot of fun. One option was that your could shoot trees and receive a point for each shot if you killed the other tank. The idea was that while one player was busy shooting trees, the other might sneak up behind for the kill.
I recreated Tank as Super Tank over Christmas break one year in college. This was a good excuse to practice my nascent C language skills. BBS’s and the Net were around and the game made it to a few archives.
Not having thought much about the game over the last few years, I was happily surprised to stumble on it last week at a site called Abandonware. They even gave it a decent review! Seeing the screenshots brings back some great memories.
It would be great fun to port it to PyGame some day.
