This was again the classic version of the Artillery Game, however you could change the height of the hill in between the players to either a mountain or a foothill (However this sometimes made no difference in the actual gameplay as some foothills were as high as mountains and some mountains were low enough to be considered foothills).
In 1983, Amoeba Software published a game called Tank Trax, which was very soon picked up and re-released by the early Mastertronic Games Company. Similar games were made for home computers such as the Commodore PET by 1981. Some games used lines on the screen to show trajectories previous shots had taken, allowing players to use visual data when considering their next shot. The Apple II games also took wind speed into account when calculating the path of the artillery.
These games built upon the earlier concepts of the artillery games published in Creative Computing but allowed the players to also see a simple graphical representation of the tanks, battlefield, and terrain. Graphical adaptions of the artillery game, such as Super Artillery and Artillery Simulator, emerged on the Apple II computer platform in 1980.
These early versions of turn-based tank combat games interpreted human-entered data such as the distance between the tanks, the velocity or "power" of the shot fired and the angle of the tanks' turrets.Īrtillery Simulator for the Apple II was among the earliest graphical versions of the turn-based artillery video game. Another early game is Gunner ( 1973) by Tom Kloos. And, finally, to a cross-platform subset of Microsoft BASIC by Creative Computing in 1979 for the book More BASIC Computer Games where it appears with multiple names: Artillery-3, Artillery 3, and WAR3.
Ported again to HP Time-Shared BASIC by Brian West in 1975. The game was then ported to TSS/8 BASIC IV by M.
One of the earliest known games in the genre is War 3 for two or three players, written in FOCAL Mod V by Mike Forman (date unknown). Artillery games have been described as a type of " shooting game", though they are more often classified as a type of strategy video game.Įarly precursors to the modern artillery-type games were text-only games that simulated artillery entirely with input data values. Artillery games are among the earliest computer games developed the theme of such games is an extension of the original uses of computer themselves, which were once used to calculate the trajectories of rockets and other related military-based calculations. The core mechanics of the gameplay is almost always to aim at the opponent(s) following a ballistic trajectory (in its simplest form, a parabolic curve). Some of these games aren't exact remakes but evolution of original ones, which were eventually open sourced.Ī Clone is a game which is very similar to or heavily inspired by a game or series.Ī Similar game is one which has similar gameplay but is not a clone.Ī Tool is not a game, but something that assists in playing or modding the game, such as a high resolution patch, or resource extractor.Artillery games are two or three-player (usually turn-based) video games involving tanks (or simply cannons) trying to destroy each other.