Combat – Tank Plus

How to play Combat online

Combat has no computer opponent, so you need a friend, one on each side of the keyboard.

• Player 1: arrow keys to move, Space to fire
• Player 2: T/F/G/H (up/left/down/right) to move, A to fire
• Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
• Choose one of the 27 variations: F11 (the console’s Select switch). The game number appears in the top left corner.
• Difficulty: F4 (Player 1) and F9 (Player 2)
• Save and load: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it

The controls change with the vehicle. Tanks drive forward with up and turn with left and right, and down does nothing. Biplanes are seen from the side: left and right set the speed, up dives and down climbs. Jets are seen from above: up and down set the speed, and left and right turn.

The game variations

Every hit on your opponent scores one point. The variations differ in vehicle, playfield and type of shot:

• Tank (games 1–5): an open field, an easy maze or a complex maze, with straight or guided missiles. You steer a guided missile after firing by turning left or right.
• Tank-Pong (games 6–9): shots bounce off walls. In “Billiard Hit” games a shot must bounce at least once before it can score. Hitting yourself with your own shot costs nothing.
• Invisible Tank (10–11) and Invisible Tank-Pong (12–14): the tanks are hidden and appear only when they fire, get hit or bump into a wall.
• Biplane (games 15–20): open sky or clouds to hide in, with guided missiles, straight missiles or rapid-fire machine guns. Games 19 and 20 put two planes against two, or one bomber against three biplanes flying in formation.
• Jet (games 21–27): the same idea with jets, including two-against-two and one-against-three games.

Each player has a difficulty switch. B is normal. On A your missiles have a shorter range and your plane flies slower, a handy handicap for the stronger player.

Tips

• Use the walls in Tank-Pong. A shot banked around a barrier is hard to see coming.
• Stay off the walls in Invisible Tank. Firing and bumping into a wall both reveal you, so shoot only when you have a good idea where your opponent is.
• Clouds don’t protect you. Hiding in a cloud hides your plane from view, but you can still be hit there.
• Steer your guided missiles. Keep turning after you fire to curve the shot into an opponent who is trying to dodge.

The story behind Combat

Combat is based on Atari’s 1974 arcade game Tank. Steve Mayer and Ron Milner of Cyan Engineering started working on it by late 1975, while the console’s hardware was still being designed. Joe Decuir then wrote it in assembly language on the final hardware, fitting it into a 2-kilobyte cartridge. Larry Wagner polished the tank games and added the biplane and jet modes.

Combat was bundled with most consoles, except those Sears sold under its Tele-Games label. Sears released its own version of the cartridge as Tank Plus. Reviewers liked it at first, but by 1982 its graphics looked dated next to newer games. Later retrospectives have been kinder, and Flux magazine placed it at number 48 in its 1995 list of the top 100 video games.