One of my earliest gaming memories: A simple Scorched-earth game where two castles on a randomly-generated terrain take turns shooting at each other by typing in an angle and power, adjusting for wind speed. My dad and I played this over and over. At such a young age, I probably learned a ton playing this game, not to mention early exposure to simulation gaming.<\/p>\n
Incidentally, I can’t find any information about the original game online, except that one guy has coded a version 2.0<\/a>. The author says he attended Kraxberger Middle School in Gladstone, Oregon, where my dad was teaching when I first played this game. Maybe it was local, coded by someone at the school? The person in question was at the school from 1991-1993, the same time I played the game.<\/p>\n Back in 20 contacted the creator of the remake to ask if he knew anything about the game’s origins, and received this reply:<\/p>\n Hello Brad, small world! It’s been awhile, but I spent a fair amount of time with your dad; I sang and played drums with the GHS swing choir until I graduated in 1997. My mother, (name redacted), also worked with him as an accompanist for several years.<\/p>\n I don’t know anything about the original author, but I do think the title “Cannons and Castles” was a local modification. I once encountered a version with the title “Super Artillery,” which I believe was the original. This may have been an improvement over an earlier version simply called “Artillery”. Wikipedia has a screen shot of “Artillery” here: http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Artillery_game<\/a><\/p>\n Super Artillery (or Cannons and Castles, as we knew it) looked very similar to that screen shot, but used a better algorithm to create the slope of the hill, which is why I think Super Artillery was a newer version. The hill was drawn with vertical lines every other pixel, which bled together to look somewhat solid but textured on an Apple II monitor; the hill looks solid here, and the castles look less detailed than I remember. Our version also used the word “velocity” in place of “force”, but this could have been a local modification.<\/p>\n It’s possible that I might have a printout of the source code to the game somewhere. Probably not, but I will look around. I’m sure I still have it on a floppy disk as well, but I have no Apple II with which to read the disk (and who knows if the floppy still works 15 years later).<\/p>\n I wish you the best of luck on your quest!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Cannons and Castles<\/strong> One of my earliest gaming memories: A simple Scorched-earth game where two castles on a randomly-generated terrain take turns shooting at each other by typing in an angle and power, adjusting for wind speed. My dad and I played this over and over. At such a young age, I probably learned a ton playing this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1394,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[422,442,423,13],"class_list":["post-1280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games","tag-apple-ii","tag-local-games","tag-played-in-1991","tag-videogame"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1280"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1395,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions\/1395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBy a teacher at Kraxberger Middle School, Gladstone, OR
\nReleased for Apple II sometime between 1987 and 1991
\nPlayed in 1991 at age 4.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n
\n1<\/sup>Artillery game (Wikipedia)<\/a>
\n2<\/sup>Cannons and Castles (Phroggy.com)<\/a>
\n3<\/sup>Artillery, Apple II<\/a>
\n4<\/sup>Scorched Parablolas: A History of the Artillery Game<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"