Scorched Earth

Scorched Earth (1991)

by Wendell Hicken
Genres:Strategy
Themes:Warfare
Game modes:Single player, Multiplayer
Story:Blast your enemies from the face of the Earth together with Earth itself. Buy bigger weapons to crush more enemies. Get more money for crushing more enemies. And finaly buy a much more bigger weapons to crush even more enemies. Scorched Earth is an early classic shareware artillery game that featured hot-seat multiplayer for up to 10 players, and was the spiritual predecessor to games like the Worms series.Show more
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Stories about this game (9)
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user avatar@noelmageuser avatar@noelmage
January 29, 2025
A friend of mine had it back before our family could afford to buy a home computer. We still played this together, local multiplayer, well into the Windows 98 era when this family computer became "his" computer he could play on in his room. Man, when you could get that deaths head round you felt like you'd won the game, only to inevitably miss by a hair.
user avatar@SaturnHerouser avatar@SaturnHero
February 04, 2025
It's just one of those games where you choose a weapon, set an aim angle and power, and watch the shot destroy parts of the level (and hopefully an enemy). But it did it really well, and it did it as one of the first in the genre. Deserves a return to life.
This was one of the best DOS games and party games of all time. I tried to play it recently using DOSBox-X, but the version of the game itself had a bug which prevented Synchronous mode from working (a bug that I remember experiencing on the original). I remember there were different bugs in various versions of the game, so depending on how you play, certain versions were better than others. The Synchronous bug was only present in certain later versions of the game, but I can't remember which. Ideal would be a GOG menu to pick which variant you want to load from between all the versions released. Synchronous was always my favourite mode as it was the only fair mode -- everyone programmed in their shots individually, then all shots fired off simultaneously. Anyone who survived got to program in another shot. It was my preferred mode to play on. But wow, Scorched Earth was the ultimate game for configurability! There are pages and pages and pages of settings to tweak almost every imaginable aspect of the game. I knew what every option did and had everything configured just right. I also had a custom messages text file that says a random line when your tank is destroyed. Me and my friends added to it over time, and it got pretty large. It was fun having endless movie references, like "This... is... from... Mathilda..." taken from the scene in "Leon: The Professional" when Leon is dying and he hands the corrupt cop a live grenade. It fit becau dying in Scorched Earth might kill other players nearby. Also had quotes from books, as well as rude insults, and whatever other random stuff we felt like putting in. So much fun! I enjoyed challenging play, so I liked to play one the smaller scales of explosion size. Some of my friends just wanted to see the world burn and liked max scale -- where one nuke would destroy half the screen, you barely needed to aim except "far away from me". So many creative weapons, tools, and mechanics to use. Loved the game.
user avatar@dnovraDuser avatar@dnovraD
February 19, 2025
Scorched Earth may not have been Gorillas.BAS or Tank Wars, but it certainly was a game that lit a fire underneath the genre with it's many special graphical tricks to really show off what PCs could do. Photo scanned mountains, plasma fractal explosions, pseudorandom explosions from the funky bomb? Pure, loving chaos.
user avatar@t4kum1user avatar@t4kum1
January 29, 2025
I remember playing it with my brother and some extended family on my aunt's PC. It was awesome, even if we didn't really understood the point of the game, it was fun to play around with all of the weapons and tools
Think I got this on a disc with a bunch of other games on it, some of them were pretty forgettable but this was one my brother and I played the heck out of. We loved all the weird and overpowered weapons you could get and the way the battlefield could change dynamically.
user avatar@mnietekuser avatar@mnietek
July 08, 2025
A game with which you could keep 10 people occupied with just one PC. Back in high school we used to go to mine or one of my friends' house and just sit around and take turns in this symphony of mindless destruction. The only thing is - try to get so many friends together offline nowadays...
I remember playing this Game in My last Day Care. We were all obbsessed with this Game! Remember to have a Friend at your computer if, you want to set-up players.
So many hours filled playing this game. While the game logistics were simple (just aim and shoot), the uniqueness came from having to choose which round to shoot and what weapons would work best. Also couldn't forget that autodefense so you could deploy a shield before your enemies. And when the Death's head Missle was set off, always cause most of your enemies to perish.
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