Tommy's Tanks

Tommy's Tanks is a tiny shareware game from 1987, and honesty demands saying it up front: this is not a lost gem, it is a curiosity from the deepest strata of the DOS era. It belongs to a sprawling line of miniature games churned out over the years by a single author — simple things written in BASIC and passed around on floppy disks as shareware.

The idea is as plain as it gets. A single-screen arena holds your tank and computer-controlled opponents. Barriers scattered across the battlefield cannot be driven through, but they can be shot to pieces, so you can quite literally carve your own firing lanes through the level. Everything is controlled from the keyboard, which takes a little getting used to.

The feature set faithfully matches the time and the distribution model: nine difficulty levels, a high-score table, a few beeps for sound, and command-line switches to force monochrome or colour output or to silence the game entirely. Details like these are a snapshot of what computer gaming looked like before big publishers took over — one person, one idea, one floppy disk.

Honestly, ten minutes is about as long as the fun lasts today. The duels have none of the depth of Atari's Combat, let alone later tank games, and the crude presentation was noticeable even when the game was new. Yet there is real value in that rawness: few places let you feel so directly what people were actually copying for each other on floppies, far away from shop windows and magazine adverts.

If that kind of archaeology appeals to you, Tommy's Tanks runs on oldgame.cz right in your browser, with nothing to install.