Ever drive a tank?  I have.

When I was younger I worked at a tractor and farming equipment proving ground where I had the opportunity to get paid to break things for a living.  One day, we got a special shipment at the proving grounds.  It seems that they were trying to put one of our motors into an older, Vietnam War-era tank.  They were going to use the tank for “training purposes”.

We unloaded the tank and proceeded to "shoehorn" the new motor into the tank, and when I say shoehorn, I am not kidding.  There is very little room to work in those things.  When finished, we took the tank out to one of the fields used to test plows and really opened it up.  I can tell you that I have never experienced anything like it.  Here I was in this tank, going 35 miles an hour across a farm field, bouncing all over the place, hitting my head on the inside of the tank, all while slowly going deaf from the roar of the engine.

I realize that most of you have never had the opportunity to drive a tank, but I would be willing to bet that most of you have within the virtual reality of a videogame.  The controls of a tank are very straight forward, and the feeling of security that you get knowing that there is a thick coating of armor around you gives you the confidence to game a little more aggressively.  

The first game that I ever did battle in a tank was Combat for the Atari 2600.  Combat was your traditional, top-down, two dimensional tank game.  If you played the game for any length of time, you could develop patterns to defeat the opposing tanks.

Fast forward twelve years, to 1989, and my next experience with virtual tanks: A-10 Tank Killer; which is one of my favorite retro games.  In A-10, you could pilot the amazing A-10 Thunderbolt and go tank hunting.  This early combat flight simulator was quite good, even though it was an early VGA title.

Some of my favorite implementations of the tank sub-genre of games were coin-op classics.  The one I first recall playing was a title simply called Tank.  It preceded and was very similar in play and look to Combat, and differed only in the fact that it was black and white.

Next we move on to another of my all time favorite games, Battlezone.  I have played almost every incarnation of this game that has ever existed.   I can conservatively estimate that I have spent hundreds of hours playing this game.  Released in 1980, Battlezone was a hit from the minute it passed through its first arcade door.  I remember standing in line and putting my quarters on a table alongside the game (to indicate that I was next in line). 

Battlezone was a one player game and it used simple ray-traced vectors to outline the tank.  The gameplay and graphics of the game were very basic and your average player could usually make it through the first level until the “super tanks” came out to play, and the game would separate the men from the boys. 

Ikari Warriors was yet another classic that, in certain levels, allowed the player to pilot a tank.  A wonderful two player game with crazy 8-position joysticks that allowed you to shoot your machine gun or throw grenades in any of the eight directions.  I would play Ikari Warriors until my wrists ached from spinning and moving the joystick.

Fast forward again, 20 years this time, and here I am playing games like Battlefield 1942 and Desert Combat, all featuring tanks with faster speeds and more powerful weapons.  The big difference I've noticed between modern tanks games and the classics is that many of the modern games have significantly more powerful anti-tank weapons.  In early games, the tank was a mechanical juggernaut - a near fortress on wheels, that would require something akin to five or six bazooka rounds to destroy it.  Today, some games feature one shot, one kill anti-tank weapons. 

But whatever the tank game, it is sure to make me feel all warm and fuzzy as it takes me back to the early days , when I got to drive that real tank.

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