I removed collision detection so I could throw bananas through buildings

The difference being that editing the source code was the point of the BASIC examples provided with DOS/QBasic/GW-Basic (they’re there to teach you programming!)

We added other weapons to make a poor mans scorched earth as we were only allowed to make games.

Mine was very simple, just finding and playing with values in config.ini for Red Alert 2 so that I could have infinite Tanyas and such.

Next step was trying to get the boot screen to display a MS-branded Borg cube but instead bricking the machine. Parents were not thrilled about that.

My first was almost kinda similar to GP: me and my cousin played a game called ReVolt, and found that you could make the cars go faster by changing their speed attribute in some text file we found just poking around the game files.

Man we had some good fun with that! It always ended with us boosting our cars so much they flew out of the map

Me as a kid realizing that the rate of fire on the shotgun was directly tied to the number of animation frames in the original Doom. Cue mecha super-extreme gatling shotgun and also mecha super-extreme choppy frame rate.

Hitscan weapons for the win.

Ooh the Dungeon Keeper demo actually had all of the characters, just not the art assets. So when I was 11 I modified the ini file and had invisible giants and vampire lords doing my bidding in my dungeon. I was very proud of myself.

The whole cracking scene was where a lot us cut our teeth learning to use machine code debuggers.

I recall the INI files of Red Alert were an open book for modding the game mechanics. I had spies with silenced pistols and "tesla cufflinks". It was really fun making crates spawn super frequently. I also vaguely recall making one of the planes into a nuke carpet bombers (fun, but the forced delay each time a nuke went off was a tad annoying).

Then there were the Duke Nukem 3D CON files...

Don't I remember doom developing pretty organically from wolfenstein and a few other (what would now be called) first person shooters around that time? The name "hexen" is coming to mind too. I would put that whole era as the start of something new, so different from the strategy games and side-scrollers that preceded it. Those first person games were the first time I thought computer games were actually more fun than the console systems, which didn't really have anything similar.

Yeah, I remember our high school IT teacher buying a 486sx25 with 8MB and a CDROM ostensibly to explore multimedia in education but mostly to play Myst.

I feel like Mario 64 was another one of those and AAA never really left Doom or Mario 64.

Yeah, this is the one that ruled my homeroom during last bit of elementary school.

They had a shared ancestor in Tanx. I also remember Tank Wars fondly.

I was gonna say, this is totally tank wars!

Neat. The website looks the same (in a good way) from when I remember it over a decade ago - are you the creator of the original java port from back then?

https://web.archive.org/web/20140210122645/http://www.scorch...

I brought it back to life at one point as a Java Swing app for my kids, but the server side of things was still wonky. I'm glad to see that it's alive again, I had a lot of fun with this in the early 2000s.

Just played a round, think I found a bug - It was down to one other computer and myself. For some reason the power capped at 235, so neither of us could come close to hitting one another.

GORILLA.BAS is arguably part of the lineage too, somewhere in there.

BOMB.EXE was my first.