Accordion Guy Advent Calendar, Day Three: Scorched Earth!

For day 3 of the Accordion Guy Advent calendar, I present Scorched Earth [633K, .zip file] “the mother of all games” as it was called back in 1994.

Scorched Earth is a tank game

in which up to 10 players — any of which can be human- or

computer-controlled — lob various kinds of artillery shells at each

other. You start the game with basic shells, but as you win, you gain

money, which allows you to buy better (and weirder) weapons, from

tracer rounds, to “liquid dirt” to “funky bombs” and so on. You also

start off defenceless, but money will allow you to buy force fields and

magnetic deflectors. It’s a simple game, but even today, it’s downright

addictive.

This is the unregistered edition of the last version of the game,

version 1.5. Registering the game unlocks more features (you can find

out more about registration here). Although it’s an old DOS game, it still plays just fine on my Windows XP box.

The game is in a .zip file; I recommend you unzip into your “Program

Files” directory. To play the game, double-click the SCORCH.EXE file.

(I’ll try and find a classic game for those of you who have Macs. The problem is that the classics won’t run on OS X machines.)