Combat Tanks

A two-player tank combat game for Windows 3.1, written in 1994 with my college roommate Randy Weems — credited under our college-era handles, Quixote (me) and Gandalf (Randy). Top-down tank-vs-tank in the lineage of Atari’s Combat (1977), built as a native Win16 application at a time when the going wisdom said no one was going to make action games for Windows.

We shipped it through Red Herring Software, the company Randy and I formed. It ran first as shareware, then got picked up by a publisher and ended up moving over 30,000 copies through mass-market retail. The download here is the original full retail installer; it should still run on Windows 9x. (It’s also archived at FreeGameArchive, and LGR did a retro review in 2015.)

The bundled Windows Help file is its own period artifact. We billed the game as “the first in a series of Windows battle games designed to merge the calculated tactfulness of strategy with the excitement of shoot-em-up action.” We wrote our own real-time multi-channel audio mixer, the “Wave Queue,” because Windows audio in 1994 was thin, and offered to license the DLL. And we tucked in a Developer’s Note that reads, three decades later, like a small time capsule of the early-90s game violence debate:

We at Red Herring would like to impress on you that although the content of this game is somewhat violent in nature, we do not support violence in any real form. Some might say that violence in any form is a bad thing. However, the violence portrayed in this game is fantasy, and fantasy must never be mistaken for reality. We feel that fantasy is a very important part of reality, and violence is a very real part of fantasy. We, as humans, need to learn to channel more of our negative inclinations, such as violence, through fantasy and leave real violence behind.

I made an ad for it, too. The headline read “AT RED HERRING, WE PLAY HARD SO YOU CAN PLAY HARD,” over a photo of me doing a stalefish pop-tart on our vert ramp. The caption underneath ran like a corporate portrait: “Red Herring president Mike Morrison working on animation routines for the next installment in the Combat series.” At the bottom, flanked by two hand-drawn fish: “Red Herring. Bringing you the finest in Windows entertainment since last January.” I was signing customer mail President around the same time.

Additional contributions came from college friends and roommates Shawn Yeager (Mr. Howell, “graphics help, advice, support and testing”), Mike Galehouse (House, “pipedream ideas, advice, support and testing”), and Zombie (“cool gameplay ideas, general sadistic input”).

Two years later, Randy and I co-authored Windows 95 Game Developer’s Guide Using the Game SDK — our first book and the only one we wrote together.

Randy was killed in a car wreck in 2001. He taught me most of what I know about game programming, and I see his fingerprints on much of what I’ve done since.