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.

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.

Now, I had my ultra tank.

• dguest

  today at 8:02 AM

  I "hacked" Cap'n Hector in Escape Velocity.

  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.

  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.

• invalidusernam3

  today at 7:35 AM

  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

• wingmanjd

  today at 3:16 AM

  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!

  • thih9

    today at 7:52 AM

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)

  • ido

    today at 3:40 AM

    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!)

  • parlortricks

    today at 3:40 AM

    We added other weapons to make a poor mans scorched earth as we were only allowed to make games.

    • pimlottc

      today at 6:02 AM

      My school had a similar loophole: game weren’t allowed in the computer lab, unless you wrote it yourself…

  • Induane

    today at 4:31 AM

    I removed collision detection so I could throw bananas through buildings

  • Barbing

    today at 6:15 AM

    Where would we be without computer class

    Something I wonder! Grateful :D

• jasonfarnon

  today at 3:37 AM

  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.

  • vintermann

    today at 7:46 AM

    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.

  • HerbManic

    today at 5:18 AM

    While not the first hack by a long shot and not even mine but I always loved the idea of how it worked.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    • gregoryl

      today at 8:26 AM

      I used a tool called ArtMoney; apparently still actively developed and sold from an .ru domain.

    • jxf

      today at 7:22 AM

      > 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.

      This class of programs absolutely still exists (see: every debugger, scanmem, GameConqueror, etc.).

      Sandboxing doesn't prevent processes from inspecting the memory of other processes, it just prevents the sandboxed process from doing things it shouldn't.

  • el_benhameen

    today at 4:39 AM

    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.

    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.

  • kstrauser

    today at 5:16 AM

    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.

  • amarant

    today at 4:13 AM

    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.

    Man we had some good fun with that! It always ended with us boosting our cars so much they flew out of the map

  • vunderba

    today at 3:48 AM

    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.

    Hitscan weapons for the win.

  • wincy

    today at 3:42 AM

    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.

  • magicalhippo

    today at 4:56 AM

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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 very satisfying when my buddy could just enter whatever result he wanted and enjoy the game.

    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.

    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Championship_Manager_2

  • colordrops

    today at 3:45 AM

    The whole cracking scene was where a lot us cut our teeth learning to use machine code debuggers.

    • stevekemp

      today at 5:24 AM

      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.

      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.

      • b3lvedere

        today at 5:46 AM

        I remember saving a lot of allowance so i could buy the Multiface One for the ZX Spectrum. Instant hacking and saving possibilities.

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

        • stevekemp

          today at 6:44 AM

          I never had one, and often lamented it!

          Being able to pause a running game and peek/poke at the RAM would have been very useful for hacking games, though of course I'd still need to crack the loader to share the POKEs with other people.

• stackghost

  today at 2:48 AM

  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.

  That feeling of being the leetest of leet haxors just from editing some ini settings was pretty glorious.

  • NBJack

    today at 3:01 AM

    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).

    Then there were the Duke Nukem 3D CON files...

    • vunderba

      today at 3:45 AM

      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

        wackplayer
      

      If you know, you know.

• leoooodias

  today at 2:30 AM

  L33T!

Mother of all games. Played so much SE when I was younger, one of my all time favs.

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:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Scorched_Earth_1991

https://dos.zone/scorched-earth/

https://www.playdosgames.com/play/scorched-earth

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.

• Timwi

  today at 7:58 AM

  > Despite many clones I've never found one that really captured the feel and fun of the original.

  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 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.

I played the hell out of the original DOS game during high school in 1992 (or thereabouts, it's been a while.)

• walrus01

  today at 1:59 AM

  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.

  • jasonfarnon

    today at 3:34 AM

    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.

    • walrus01

      today at 4:22 AM

      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.

      DOOM having stairs and up/down movement, and vertical elements to the level design was really revolutionary at the time.

      • HerbManic

        today at 5:27 AM

        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.

    • aidenn0

      today at 3:58 AM

      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.

      • RetroTechie

        today at 8:09 AM

        > ..and inspiring every studio to stop what they are doing and make something in that genre.

        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.

        Don't get me wrong: that, and the 'infinite' storage of CD-ROMs got us many nice games.

        But neither did much to sharpen game developer's creativity skills. Many "me too! (meh..)" releases in that era.

  • FireBeyond

    today at 2:25 AM

    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.

  • conception

    today at 3:24 AM

    I feel like Mario 64 was another one of those and AAA never really left Doom or Mario 64.

• The_Blade

  today at 1:44 AM

  same, it was a step up from dopewars, but not quite leisure suit larry which one of our friends had

  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!!

• el_duderino

  today at 1:59 AM

  Same! I remember playing this during my Borland C++ for DOS class in school. Good times.

• alterom

  today at 2:23 AM

  We played Tank Wars by Kenny Morse, it's from 1990 and preceded Scorched Earth:

  https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274

  More unhinged fun IMO

  • mpyne

    today at 2:41 AM

    Yeah, this is the one that ruled my homeroom during last bit of elementary school.

  • Cpoll

    today at 2:51 AM

    They had a shared ancestor in Tanx. I also remember Tank Wars fondly.

    • alterom

      today at 6:21 AM

      Nah, Ken Morse's Tank Wars really was the mother of all artillery games.

      Tank Wars came out in 1990, Tanks came out in 1991.

      There were 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 really fun, and which Scorched Earth inherited.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game#Artillery_games...

  • sonar_un

    today at 2:37 AM

    I was gonna say, this is totally tank wars!

• api

  today at 1:37 AM

  It was fun. Was a bit younger but played it like crazy too on my 286.

  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.

  There were all kinds of neat hacks.

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.

• reconnecting

  today at 7:37 AM

  Must be Wendell Hicken.

  https://www.whicken.com/

  • skirmish

    today at 7:50 AM

    Yes, it was.

Don't forget the official Scorched Earth website (1) and an interview with its creator, Wendell T. Hicken (2)

1) https://www.whicken.com/scorch/

2) https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/03/scorched/

for the 25th anniversary (approximately) I vibecoded what i wanted to do for years -- port of the original remake (yes) to JavaScript. Alive again.

• alex_anglin

  today at 1:09 AM

  Doing the lords work, as they say. Thank you for sharing.

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)

• Waterluvian

  today at 3:21 AM

  Yup. Hours and hours of this. Along with a Java skiing sim called Motion Playground.

• meshko

  today at 1:31 AM

  yup, it was a java applet. Stopped working when Java in the browser died.

  • vunderba

    today at 3:28 AM

    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?

    https://web.archive.org/web/20140210122645/http://www.scorch...

  • fullstop

    today at 2:08 AM

    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.

  • skeeterbug

    today at 1:34 AM

    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.

    • meshko

      today at 1:36 AM

      you probably got damage. If stuck like this, go to menu and select "mass kill"

      • Forgeties79

        today at 1:55 AM

        Wow that’s a lot to unpack lol

Ooh, and it's fully playable!

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

• HerbManic

  today at 5:44 AM

  There are some Chess games from that era that tied their difficulty to the CPU speed. Essentially calculate options for 5 seconds or something like that. So as hardware got faster, the games got way more difficult.

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

original Scorched Earth is only 4 years older than Worms

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?

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.

omg, 286 with B/W CRT display

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.

Holy... the nostalgia, I played the hell out of this game in computer class back in school 25 years ago, time flies.

I did not realize Pocket Tanks was a derivative work.

• compiler-guy

  today at 2:20 AM

  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 ][.

  • iamnothere

    today at 3:11 AM

    GORILLA.BAS is arguably part of the lineage too, somewhere in there.

• Sharlin

  today at 5:44 AM

  Worms is as well. It’s an entire genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game

  • prmoustache

    today at 8:02 AM

    I like Hedgewars which is an open source game similar to Worms but with hedgehogs. It is available as package in most Linux distros but also on Windows, Mac and FreeBSD. I believe it is available on Steam as well.

• alterom

  today at 2:22 AM

  So is Scorched Earth, it's preceded (at least) by "Tank Wars" (aka BOMB.EXE) by Kenny Morse from 1990:

  https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274

  • mock-possum

    today at 4:34 AM

    BOMB.EXE was my first.

• nodrog3000

  today at 2:15 AM

  Haha, same

• today at 2:14 AM

We used to play the DOS version in AP Computers in HS back in 1994.

Wow! Curious how you did multiplayer over the web? What stack did you use?

This bring me back so many good memories! Thank you!

What was the game like this with apes throwing bananas?

• nope96

  today at 3:12 AM

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)

Thank you for this blast from the past.

Man, I used to play this game a ton.... and the throw the banana game that was written in basic and came with DOS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyBD0X81tjk

NO. WAY.

This made my whole day. Thank you.

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.

A related page:

Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games

http://www.whicken.com/scorch/

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092060)

• meshko

  today at 2:08 AM

  yeah, that's the original. It is better than this remake but no multiplayer.

Didn't realize that in 2026 people still ran an http only websites

I remember the original Scorched Earth being one of the few games that could actually do SVGA graphics at the time.

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.

LOL nostalgic

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