Robot Tank

About Robot Tank

Robot Tank (1983) is Alan Miller's first-person tank combat game for the Atari 2600, in the mould of Battlezone but with damageable systems, day and night battles and weather, hailed at the time as the best combat game on the system.

Robot Tank in Depth

In 2019, the player remotely controls a robot tank, using radar to find and destroy enemy robot tanks heading for downtown Santa Clara, California. The enemy comes in squadrons of 12, and each squadron defeated adds a reserve tank to the starting three, up to a maximum of 12; the game ends when all the player's tanks are gone. Instead of exploding at the first hit, the tank suffers damage to individual systems, permanently weakening its firepower or its video display, until enough damage destroys it.

Battles happen at any time of day or night, shown on screen, and at night tanks must be tracked by radar alone. Each level's weather is announced at the start: clear, rain, which slows the tank, snow, which costs it traction, or fog, which limits its vision. When the player's tank is destroyed, the view dissolves into static, a touch young critic Rawson Stovall singled out.

Making Robot Tank

Miller had made Surround, Hangman and Basketball at Atari before co-founding Activision with David Crane, where his games included Tennis, Ice Hockey and his most financially successful, Starmaster. He spent about two months writing code, two on graphics, sound and balancing the challenge, and two more having colleagues play it while he spent hundreds of hours debugging. Released in June 1983, it was among Activision's biggest hits of the year. Bill Kunkel called its graphics "non-parallel in the 2600 universe" and the game Miller's "masterpiece", "perhaps the finest target-arcade program ever developed for the 2600", and Computer Entertainer called it "the best combat game yet" for the system, though some found it unoriginal and critics regretted that damaged tanks cannot be repaired. Electronic Fun included it among the best video games ever in 1984. Allgame later called it "far ahead of its time" and "one of the most sophisticated Atari 2600 games", though it felt the weather gave only a false sense of variety.