Shekarchi Tank, meaning Tank Hunter, was released in December 1996 by the Iranian studio Honafa and is usually cited as the first video game made in Iran. It is a plain two-dimensional DOS shooter with no end state: you control a man with a rocket launcher and pick off tanks as they roll in, one after another.

The subject is the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988, still recent history when the game appeared. Honafa worked for state bodies, among them the ministry of culture and later the national drug-control agency, so its output was commissioned rather than sold on a market. International retro sites barely register the title, yet for the Iranian scene it is year zero.