Artillery game

Artillery games are two or three-player (usually turn-based) video games involving tanks (or simply cannons) trying to destroy each other. The core mechanics of the gameplay is almost always to aim at the opponent(s) following a ballistic trajectory (in its simplest form, a parabolic curve). Artillery games are among the earliest computer games developed; the theme of such games is an extension of the original uses of computer themselves, which were once used to calculate the trajectories of rockets and other related military-based calculations. Artillery games have been described as a type of "shooting game", though they are more often classified as a type of strategy video game.

Early precursors to the modern artillery-type games were text-only games that simulated artillery entirely with input data values. One of the earliest known games in the genre is War 3 for two or three players, written in FOCAL Mod V by Mike Forman (date unknown). The game was then ported to TSS/8 BASIC IV by M. E. Lyon Jr. in 1972. Ported again to HP Time-Shared BASIC by Brian West in 1975. And, finally, to a cross-platform subset of Microsoft BASIC by Creative Computing in 1979 for the book More BASIC Computer Games where it appears with multiple names: Artillery-3, Artillery 3, and WAR3. Another early game is Gunner (1973) by Tom Kloos. These early versions of turn-based tank combat games interpreted human-entered data such as the distance between the tanks, the velocity or "power" of the shot fired and the angle of the tanks' turrets.