Hovertank One

Hovertank One
Title screen
Developer	id Software
Publisher	Softdisk
Director	Tom Hall
Designer	Tom Hall
Programmers	John Carmack John Romero
Artist	Adrian Carmack
Engine	Prototype of Wolfenstein 3D engine
Platform	MS-DOS
Release	NA: 1991
Genres	Vehicular combat, first-person shooter
Mode	Single-player

Hovertank One (also known as Hovertank and Hovertank 3D) is a vehicular combat game for MS-DOS developed by id Software and published by Softdisk in 1991.

Plot

Hovertank One is set during a nuclear war. In Hovertank One, the player controls Brick Sledge, a mercenary hired by an unknown organization (referred to by the game as the "UFA") to rescue people from cities under the threat of nuclear attack (largely political activists or scientists), both by the government and by large corporations, but the cities are also full of mutated humans, strange creatures and enemy hovertanks.

Gameplay

Gameplay screenshot

The player drives a hovertank through the levels and try to find the people Brick is supposed to rescue. There are many enemies in the levels, who are hunting down the people as well as the player. The player can keep track of both people and enemies in the radar box at the bottom of the screen. There is a timer that counts how long until the nuke is dropped. Once all the living people are collected a yellow teleporter appears somewhere in the level, and the player must find it to win. The player receives their fee, based on the number of people safely rescued, and how fast the operation was completed. All damage to the hovertank is repaired at the end of the level.

Development

The video game company id Software was founded on February 1st, 1991 by John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall. The four founders had an agreement with their former employer, software company Softdisk, to develop one game every two months for the Gamer's Edge PC game subscription service. In the first months of 1991 they developed the platform game Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, followed by the puzzle game Rescue Rover.

While the team was working on these games, programmer John Carmack was experimenting with 3D rendering. At that time 3D games already existed, with the space dogfight game Wing Commander being one of the favorites among the id Software crew. However, existing 3D games were noticeably slow and John Carmack preferred fast action games like Gauntlet. Therefore, Carmack's goal was to develop a game engine for a fast 3D action game. Carmack started his research by buying some literature on trigonometry and other mathematics related to 3D rendering. At first, he created a demonstration application of a cube rotating in 3D. Then he developed an animated Gamer's Edge logo that would scale in 2D, which was used in Dangerous Dave. Drawing arbitrary polygons would be very slow on PC hardware of that time, so Carmack came up with the idea of rendering walls in 3D as simple trapezoids. Further performance was gained by representing characters in the 3D world as 2D images that would scale depending on the distance towards the player. His research into this game engine took six weeks, two weeks longer than any id Software engine before it.

When John Carmack demonstrated this game engine to the rest of the team in April 1991, they decided to create Hovertank One: a game where the player would drive around in a futuristic tank to shoot at enemies and rescue hostages. Artist Adrian Carmack enjoyed drawing the monsters and other ghoulish touches. The levels were designed by John Romero and Tom Hall. The levels consisted of orthogonally placed walls, which enabled them to reuse their internally developed Tile EDitor, named TED. The deadline for submitting the game to Softdisk was May 31, 1991, which the team managed to meet just in time.

Release

Hovertank One was initially distributed in 1991 by Softdisk as part of their Gamer's Edge subscription service. In 1992, the game was marketed by Softdisk as part of The Lost Game Collection of ID Software. Hovertank One was also included in the id Anthology collection, as published by id Software in 1996.

Legacy

Other 3D titles at the time, such as flight simulators and other games (such as Alpha Waves) that had more detailed environments, were noticeably slower. A similar engine was used by MIDI Maze for the Atari ST in 1987, as well as Wayout for the Apple II from 1982 and The Eidolon from 1985 for the Atari 8-bit computers. The engine written for this game was expanded upon with texture mapping to make Catacomb 3-D, and then later Wolfenstein 3D.

The source code to the game, owned by Flat Rock Software, was released in June 2014 under GNU GPL-2.0-or-later.