Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games

whicken.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 146 posts

Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games

#131

Post by fatnoah »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #70
skirmish wrote: post #3

I spent so many hours on it. Then I got my first job, and one co-worker I worked closely with was: Wendell Hicken. One day he casually mentioned, I wrote Scorch, was a lot of fun to program. Only then I connected dots.

I was in college when this game was released. I spent countless hours playing with my roommates. The game holds up to this day for boys under 12. After that, maybe they expect better graphics, but my experience is that interest wanes.

Yes! Epic Scorched Earth battles happened on my dorm floor. The only thing more competitive was getting into the leaderboard for Mute City on F-Zero.

Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games

#132

Post by adamrezich »

rentonl wrote: post #92

Spent so much time playing this. There was a spiritual successor of sorts called "Pocket Tanks" in 2001 which was also a lot of fun.

I was just talking about Pocket Tanks the other day, for the first time in years... for some reason, the demo version was preinstalled on all of the iMacs in my school district growing up. this got me to thinking, I'm not a Mac guy so I'm not really sure but there's no way it actually shipped with MacOS, right? it must've been put in by a distributor, whoever did the deal with our district. well, on behalf of myself and the rest of my cohort: thank you, that game was dope.

Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games

#134

Post by danielodievich »

Played while growing up in crumbling to pieces Soviet Union in 1991. We'd regularly have 7-10 kids (I think 10 players max it supports) crowding in a little cubby room around our venerable 286 with turbo button. I don't know how we fit around it or how my parents really handled it all but we sure had a lot of fun.

Fast forward to now, and I played this game in an online emulator with my teenage sons, having just as much fun as back then lobby Funky Bombs and Baby Nukes at each other. My children love the Insult-On-Death mode and random wall actions. They have just as much fun with these tiny EGA pixels as with the modern graphics masterpieces like Elden Ring and Halo Infinite.

Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games

#136

Post by somat »

wodenokoto wrote: post #64

What’s with the tagline “mother of all games”?

I think it was a sort of in joke on a popular news topic in the era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon

The press, I distinctly recall, liked to call it. "The mother of all guns" However I am unable to find a citation in the 30 seconds I spent looking for it.

Post reply on HN