9 year old me got my first "hacking" experience out of this game. With the shareware version, you could not select the ultra tank that could shoot 3 bullets for a human, but you COULD if it were the computer player.<p>The "hack":
-start a game with a normal tank VS ultra computer player as p2.
-save the game (as a file).
-open the game file.
-read the ASCII text and just flip which player has which text.<p>Now, I had my ultra tank.
I "hacked" Cap'n Hector in Escape Velocity.<p>The game was shareware and he'd show up to ask you to pay the fee. After the trial period he'd start lobbing missiles at you. There was a basic editor you could open to adjust all the ship stats and weapons, so while you couldn't turn him friendly you could at least de-claw him.<p>I remember thinking it was weird how "easy" it was to work around, but it's hard to imagine the studio would care much: a pre-internet 14 year who loved the game that much is probably more useful as an ambassador than a paying customer.
I did something similar for the sequel Escape Velocity Override when I was a kid. It also had the same Captain Hector. Though in my case I buffed my own ship's armor and shields instead. I was not very good at the game (still am not to be honest), so I kind of needed that anyway to get through it.<p>I also remember that in EV Override you needed to stay below a certain amount of money to not trigger Captain Hector, and I would set the system clock back so it wouldn't think that the trial period had passed.<p>There are two modern spiritual successors to the EV games that might interest you if you haven't heard of them. Both are open source and have a decent amount of content (but aren't complete): Endless Sky, and Naev. Where the former is much closer to the old EV games in feel.
Also, if the game is single-player, you don't care: Simply let the players enjoy the game how they want to enjoy it.
That's true if it was just cheating.<p>But in this case I was hacking the shareware payment enforcement. Rather than shutting down completely the game would send an invincible and fairly destructive enemy (Hector) after you. It was really a clever trick from the developers to make the game mostly unplayable if you didn't pay after the trial period.
Ahh it didn't click that this was shareware enforcement, thanks. I guess back in those days developers weren't really fussed about payment, because paying was really hard (mailing in checks, and nobody had credit cards).<p>Many of them (us) made software for the love of it, and didn't care if it was cracked. I never got a single sale from my software but I didn't care.
Shigeru Miyamoto feels personally attacked by your comment :)
Scorched Earth was also my first hacking target. Found out that your cash balance and weapons inventory was all stored in a mysterious .ini file and you could just edit it.
Mine was on a similar game, GORILLA.BAS. I would edit the banana code for a much bigger explosion. Lots of fun back in computer class!
The difference being that editing the source code was the point of the BASIC examples provided with DOS/QBasic/GW-Basic (they’re there to teach you programming!)
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)</a>
After learning the secret of "breaking" protected BASIC programs in DOS (which involved a poke, as I recall), I remember making higher difficulty levels for a BASIC Star Trek game, because it just wasn't very hard.
We added other weapons to make a poor mans scorched earth as we were only allowed to make games.
oh man!!!!!!
You reminded me my first gaming experience on a PC with oragne-green screen :D Awesome game
I removed collision detection so I could throw bananas through buildings
Where would we be without computer class<p>Something I wonder! Grateful :D
It would be a nice thread on here, to see what people's first hacks were, especially from that era when people were usually just alone and stumbling on these things.
While not the first hack by a long shot and not even mine but I always loved the idea of how it worked.<p>There used to be program called Gamehack or something like that. Essentially you would start the game and point this application at said game in RAM, then take note of something like the score being "187" or whatever. Jump into 'Gamehack' and it would search for everything in memory with that value. You would then play for a little bit longer and once the score had changed, you could then jump into game hack and find which of those memory addresses had changed to the new score. Usually you would only have one, you could then change this number to what ever you wanted.<p>It was such a simple concept but it worked so well. Wouldn't be able to do something like that anymore due to all manner of sandboxing in action. Lost a tool, gained security.<p>Only other hack was messing with the vehicle stats in Vice City. Ended up with the firetruck that could jump the entire map. Good fun.
> It was such a simple concept but it worked so well. Wouldn't be able to do something like that anymore due to all manner of sandboxing in action. Lost a tool, gained security.<p>This class of programs absolutely still exists (see: every debugger, scanmem, GameConqueror, etc.).<p>Sandboxing doesn't prevent processes from inspecting the memory of other processes, it just prevents the sandboxed process from doing things it shouldn't.
This reminds me of Game Genie:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Genie" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Genie</a><p>They really markted that well has having to enter codes, but of course, they were just ROM addresses + values to pretend to be at those addresses.
Sounds like a precursor to CheatEngine<p><a href="https://cheatengine.org/" rel="nofollow">https://cheatengine.org/</a>
I used a tool called ArtMoney; apparently still actively developed and sold from an .ru domain.
Playing Omega (roguelike) on ATARI ST, there were food shops that you could buy stacks of fried lizard bites if I remember correctly? Anyways, I found out that if you bought the max amount 99999999, it would actually give you money. Baby's first buffer overflow. The only issue is that it would also put that amount in your inventory, so you were basically too slow to move and had to drop each stack so my towns were littered with stacks of lizard bites. I'm not sure where the bug was introduced and I never found it in the PC versions later on when I looked.
Opening Eye of the Beholder II save files and moving items in your inventory to detect the hex code.<p>Then trying other random codes and finding stuff in your inventory like animal carcass
This might make a nice top-level Ask HN.
Saving a game in Bard’s Tale (for Amiga). Buying an item in a store. Saving the game again. Comparing the save files with a hand-rolled AmigaBASIC hex dumper to find the bytes that changed. Working out from there how it stored money balances in the file. Tweak a little… and voila, everyone in my party’s getting mithril plate and frost horns.
I had a Loki software demo of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 for Linux. Couldn't find the full game anywhere, certainly not legally. You could only play one scenario with one town.
But from saving and comparing save files in a hex editor, I figured out how to play as the other towns, change heroes and skills etc. The key discovery was finding out that the saves were compressed with something very like gzip. The game complained that checksums didn't match when I loaded a decompressed->modified->recompressed save file, but it still worked just fine.
My first was almost kinda similar to GP: me and my cousin played a game called ReVolt, and found that you could make the cars go faster by changing their speed attribute in some text file we found just poking around the game files.<p>Man we had some good fun with that! It always ended with us boosting our cars so much they flew out of the map
Mine was very simple, just finding and playing with values in config.ini for Red Alert 2 so that I could have infinite Tanyas and such.<p>Next step was trying to get the boot screen to display a MS-branded Borg cube but instead bricking the machine. Parents were not thrilled about that.
Ooh the Dungeon Keeper demo actually had all of the characters, just not the art assets. So when I was 11 I modified the ini file and had invisible giants and vampire lords doing my bidding in my dungeon. I was very proud of myself.
Did anyone manage to cheat in Oregon Trail?<p>I imagine you could change the chances of mishaps, or start with $1M, or remove the limit of how many buffalo steaks you could bring back from a hunt.
Me as a kid realizing that the rate of fire on the shotgun was directly tied to the number of animation frames in the original Doom. Cue mecha super-extreme gatling shotgun and also mecha super-extreme choppy frame rate.<p>Hitscan weapons for the win.
Adding money to a CIV 1 save game file with the PCTOOLS hex editor.
Bypassed the anti-piracy manual check in the second Championship Manager[1] game for my buddy. It was a typical check at the time which in this case asked you to reference a table of soccer matches in the manual and enter the correct game results for one of the games, ie 1-3 or similar.<p>I had been teaching myself programming for a few of years and had recently gotten my hands on Turbo Pascal. I had just started dabbling in assembly as well. So I launched the game through the debugger and by stepping through functions, in assembly obviously since I didn't have source, I finally got to the place where it waited for me to input the game results.<p>It encoded the game result in a single register, and compared the value in that register to a value in another register which it had loaded the correct value into.<p>Using the surrounding code, I located the byte in the executable and replaced that one comparison instruction with one which compared one of the registers with itself, which of course was the same all day err day. Wrote a small program to apply the one-byte patch.<p>Took a lot of time, especially tracing to find the right place since I wasn't very good at using the debugger nor that proficient with assembly. But <i>very</i> satisfying when my buddy could just enter whatever result he wanted and enjoy the game.<p>After that I dropped cracking games and focused on save-game cheats which I did for a while until games added sanity checks or just had very dynamic save-game formats.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Championship_Manager_2" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Championship_Manager_2</a>
The whole cracking scene was where a lot us cut our teeth learning to use machine code debuggers.
Very much so. Fixing software so that they correctly recognized my preferred serial number of #12345 was valid. Using soft-ice to register itself was always a deeply ironic.<p>But to be honest I started before then, on the ZX Spectrum. First of all it was patching games to get infinite lives, or time. But later it became necessary to patch the loaders before you could even access the game-code - speedlock, bleeplock, etc.
Sounds familiar. As a kid I was bothered that I had to harvest spice or Tiberium (I forgot whether it was Dune 2 or Command & Conquer, but I think the latter).<p>So I figured out where in the binary save file credits were stored and wrote a small Pascal program that would give me the highest possible credits so that I could focus on base and unit building :).
This reminds me of something similar I did as a teenager in the 90s. Also some shareware game, can't remember exactly what it was about (I think a submarine game?). The shareware version only gave access to the first map. After digging around the files I found that it included all the maps and simply renaming map n to map 1's file name allowed you to play it
I had a similar youthful hacking experience with this game, I was also 9 at the time. The computer players would say a little trash-talk phrase before making their shot. I edited the text file that contained all the phrases and added new ones with swear words. My older brother, who was the one that installed the game on our computer, noticed the new phrases asked me if I had edited the text file. I lied that I hadn't, then re-edited the file to remove my changes.
Mine was similar but it was the original C&C. Found this sketchy-ass save game editor/mod editor, proceeded to give the little Nod buggies the laser from the obelisk of light to trivialize the single player campaign.<p>That feeling of being the leetest of leet haxors just from editing some ini settings was pretty glorious.
I recall the INI files of Red Alert were an open book for modding the game mechanics. I had spies with silenced pistols and "tesla cufflinks". It was really fun making crates spawn super frequently. I also vaguely recall making one of the planes into a nuke carpet bombers (fun, but the forced delay each time a nuke went off was a tad annoying).<p>Then there were the Duke Nukem 3D CON files...
CON files were great. One of the first enemies I made as a kid was a "basilisk"-type creature that if you looked at, there was a RNG chance it would<p><pre><code> wackplayer
</code></pre>
If you know, you know.
L33T!
Mother of all games. Played so much SE when I was younger, one of my all time favs.<p>This version is ok but I prefer the original which is easy enough to run via dos-box, emulators of similar ilk or even online in a few places:<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/msdos_Scorched_Earth_1991" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/msdos_Scorched_Earth_1991</a><p><a href="https://dos.zone/scorched-earth/" rel="nofollow">https://dos.zone/scorched-earth/</a><p><a href="https://www.playdosgames.com/play/scorched-earth" rel="nofollow">https://www.playdosgames.com/play/scorched-earth</a><p>I loved turning the explosion to the max and launching Nukes or Death Head MIRVs and watching the whole screen be annihilated. Despite many clones I've never found one that really captured the feel and fun of the original. I'd love to see a faithful remake that had a larger playing area though.
> Despite many clones I've never found one that really captured the feel and fun of the original.<p>Not trying to be contrarian, but for factual correctness I'm going to point out that Scorched Earth is a clone of an earlier game, Tank Wars. I've played both and I agree that Scorched Earth had more to it, but it wasn't the original.
Scorched Tanks on Amiga got decently close
Original scorch had a text file with all the sayings the tanks would "shout" out just before firing. Trading those around on BBSes was part of the fun. I still remember, "from Hell's heart I stab at thee!" which is probably from some classic literature that I don't know, lol!
Scorched Earth taught me the concept of software versions. It was the first program that I ever knowingly interacted with more than one point-release of. I had version 1.0, but a friend had version 1.2. My very young mind was boggled by the concept of software being updated.
In my first job after graduation in a small company I was talking to the VP of engineering, and he mentioned offhand: "yeah, I wrote Scorch when I was in college". Mind blown.
I played the hell out of the original DOS game during high school in 1992 (or thereabouts, it's been a while.)
Early 90s DOS games were certainly quite creative. I mentally draw a dividing line between approximately the start of the era when the first Soundblaster became a common thing to find in affordable home x86 PCs, and early CD-ROM based games were also available (1991-1992), and the December 1993 release of DOOM and everything that came after. Very interesting era in the time frame in between there.
Don't I remember doom developing pretty organically from wolfenstein and a few other (what would now be called) first person shooters around that time? The name "hexen" is coming to mind too. I would put that whole era as the start of something new, so different from the strategy games and side-scrollers that preceded it. Those first person games were the first time I thought computer games were actually more fun than the console systems, which didn't really have anything similar.
I think the big difference for me, after playing a lot of Wolfenstein 3D, was two things... The system I had it on didn't have the CPU to run wolf3d in something like a full screen size, it was something like a 386SX/20. By the time DOOM came around I had a much more capable desktop. Secondly, wolfenstein 3d was everything on a flat two dimensional plane of grey floor. There was one size of wall or door tile and everything had the same ceiling height and same wall height.<p>DOOM having stairs and up/down movement, and vertical elements to the level design was really revolutionary at the time.
Yep, Wolf3D is a fairly simple ray casting system (see if in visible cone, scale with distance) and Doom is Binary space partitioned that could allow complex geometry, something that is still used til this day.
Warcraft II and Doom are both examples of, while not being the first in their genres, defining their genres and inspiring every studio to stop what they are doing and make something in that genre.
<i>> ..and inspiring every studio to stop what they are doing and make something in that genre.</i><p>This. After Doom, there were maaany releases where a studio had X out there, and then released [3D version of X]. Or also throw themselves onto the fps genre. Almost to the point of killing innovation.<p>Don't get me wrong: that, and the 'infinite' storage of CD-ROMs got us many nice games.<p>But neither did much to sharpen game developer's creativity skills. Many "me too! (meh..)" releases in that era.
Yeah, I remember our high school IT teacher buying a 486sx25 with 8MB and a CDROM ostensibly to explore multimedia in education but mostly to play Myst.
I feel like Mario 64 was another one of those and AAA never really left Doom or Mario 64.
same, it was a step up from dopewars, but not quite leisure suit larry which one of our friends had<p>years later i defeated the high score of Stephen Meek and realized with horror Oregon Trail was intended to teach patience not just dysentery damn you MECC!!
Same! I remember playing this during my Borland C++ for DOS class in school. Good times.
We played Tank Wars by Kenny Morse, it's from 1990 and preceded Scorched Earth:<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274</a><p>More unhinged fun IMO
I just want to let this Atari ST classic here: Ballerburg (1987) is massive fun.
Yeah, this is the one that ruled my homeroom during last bit of elementary school.
They had a shared ancestor in Tanx. I also remember Tank Wars fondly.
Nah, Ken Morse's <i>Tank Wars</i> really <i>was</i> the mother of all artillery games.<p>Tank Wars came out in 1990, <i>Tanks</i> came out in 1991.<p>There <i>were</i> artillery games before Tank Wars, of course. But none, to my knowledge, had AI players and insane weapon purchases, which is what made the game <i>really</i> fun, and which Scorched Earth inherited.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game#Artillery_games_for_MS-DOS" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game#Artillery_games...</a>
I was gonna say, this is totally tank wars!
It was fun. Was a bit younger but played it like crazy too on my 286.<p>Rollers! Lava! It’s like the author started with a simple tank war game and then just threw in every weird little effect they could code as a creative weapon.<p>There were all kinds of neat hacks.
There exists 3D version:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_3D" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_3D</a><p><a href="http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/</a>
Back in the early 2000s, that scene was HOPPING. A whole bunch of mods were around, some of which seem to have disappeared, particularly Armored Warfare Evolved.<p>A couple of things happened (at least to my perception): a bug cropped up in the Apocalypse mod where hitting a small shop would cause it to burn for over a minute, disrupting multi-player game play, and on the servers there was an invasion by trolls complete with Nazi avatars, who drove players away (myself included).
for the 25th anniversary (approximately) I vibecoded what i wanted to do for years -- port of the original remake (yes) to JavaScript. Alive again.
Great work! People are not realizing to press "start". Possible to add audio notification and/or highlighting the button red when ready?
Doing the lords work, as they say. Thank you for sharing.
PSA: YOU NEED TO PRESS THE START BUTTON IF YOU ARE HOSTING A GAME.<p>People are creating games and waiting and waiting ...
Oh man, we played this in computer lab in high school to pass time after we were done with our assignments. I believe it was a java/flash version though (year 2000/2001)
Yup. Hours and hours of this. Along with a Java skiing sim called Motion Playground.
yup, it was a java applet. Stopped working when Java in the browser died.
Neat. The website looks the same (in a good way) from when I remember it over a decade ago - are you the creator of the original java port from back then?<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140210122645/http://www.scorch2000.com" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20140210122645/http://www.scorch...</a>
I brought it back to life at one point as a Java Swing app for my kids, but the server side of things was still wonky. I'm glad to see that it's alive again, I had a lot of fun with this in the early 2000s.
Just played a round, think I found a bug - It was down to one other computer and myself. For some reason the power capped at 235, so neither of us could come close to hitting one another.
There's also xscorch <a href="http://www.xscorch.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.xscorch.org/</a>
Damn it! Can you please stop thwarting my company release cycle? Now the entire dev team is playing this!<p>Good thing that I'm winning. Everyone who looses his tank goes to do the deploy.
Pocket Tanks was my ultimate childhood game that I played with my classmates during our computer lab lessons. I believe Scorched Earth was it's inspiration
Just remember: "NO KIBITZING"!<p>Sadly, it appears ChatGPT 5.5 did not implement this crucial feature for this javascript port.
Ooh, and it's fully playable!<p>Last time I tried this game, I think I had managed to get a hold of the original executable or something: the rate of turn for the turret was tied to CPU cycles. Paying it on a computer about a decade younger than the game made it quite impossible to aim, as the turret would spin several laps if you so much as looked at the arrow key
I remember playing this in college. Such good times.
No way! I played the original (too much) while doing computer science at uni in the early 1990s. My friends were either playing the Dune RTS or mmorpgs, depending on their leaning. A lot of the limited available computing power went into playtime in those days :)
I'm making a WebAssembly clone of this fantastic game. Stay tuned...
This bring me back so many good memories! Thank you!
I did not realize Pocket Tanks was a derivative work.
Discussion of the genre’s legacy is not complete without Artillery Duel for the Atari VCS 2600.<p><a href="https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-artillery-duel_8371.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-artillery-due...</a>
Tank games like this have a long heritage. Scorch is probably the pinnacle, but I played primitive versions of this all the way back on an Apple ][.
Scorched Tanks on Amiga was the real derivative work, Pocket Tanks was that author's more modern update
Worms is as well. It’s an entire genre: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game</a>
So is Scorched Earth, it's preceded (at least) by "Tank Wars" (aka BOMB.EXE) by Kenny Morse from 1990:<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274</a>
Haha, same
I wasted most of my high school years on the OG (1991) version. I love how such a simple concept can make for such a great game
OMG. One of my favorite games. It was fun to explore all the weapons and utilities with my brother.
A related page:<p><i>Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games</i><p><a href="http://www.whicken.com/scorch/" rel="nofollow">http://www.whicken.com/scorch/</a><p>(<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092060">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092060</a>)
Holy... the nostalgia, I played the hell out of this game in computer class back in school 25 years ago, time flies.
Thank you for this blast from the past.
NO. WAY.<p>This made my whole day. Thank you.
Wow! Curious how you did multiplayer over the web? What stack did you use?
We used to play the DOS version in AP Computers in HS back in 1994.
What was the game like this with apes throwing bananas?
original Scorched Earth is only 4 years older than Worms<p>Hard to understand for me why would anyone play this when they can play much funnier Worms. I mean I played Scorched Earth with my cousin before Worms existed, but once they released Worms why would we play it?<p>I am still playing Worms Armageddon in 2026 with my kids on PS3 at least once or twice a week (the original graphics didn't age very well for 4K TVs), though not retro levels, they are way too small, dunno why they didn't scale them up for higher resolution.
I remember the original Scorched Earth being one of the few games that could actually do SVGA graphics at the time.<p>Most games of the era where 320x240 8 bit 256 colors, I had a 286 with 800x600 SVGA monitor and that game could actually use it although it was only 4 bit 16 color, don't think I ever played the 256 color in the last version.
OH GOD! MY NOSTALGIA!!!!
Hoooooly hell I totally forgot about this. Talk about dredging up some memories. I don’t think I have thought about this game in literally 20 years.
omg, 286 with B/W CRT display
Didn't realize that in 2026 people still ran an http only websites
Man, I used to play this game a ton.... and the throw the banana game that was written in basic and came with DOS.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyBD0X81tjk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyBD0X81tjk</a>
LOL nostalgic
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