Can you throw a baseball over a fence and hit a target you can’t see? This is similar to how artillery games work. Players take turns controlling the angle and firepower of their artillery weapons (tanks, catapults, angry birds, etc.) to shoot indirectly at targets behind intervening obstacles. Often, a player must take wind speed into account or risk shooting short or sailing their projectile past their target.
One of the first examples was Artillery, written in the early 1970s for the Tektronix 4051 microcomputer. This evolved into games like War 3 (1976) for Microsoft BASIC and Artillery Simulator (1980) for Apple II. Smithereens! (1981) for the Odyssey 2 was the first artillery game for home consoles and uses a digitized voice to taunt the players: “Come on turkey, hit it!”
Not all artillery games are military conflicts. King Kong-sized gorillas hurl explosive bananas at each other on a skyline of skyscrapers in Microsoft’s QBasic Gorillas (1990). Team17’s Worms (1995) have 4-worm teams fighting each other with rocket launchers, mines, cluster bombs, exploding sheep, and more. Armor Games’ Crush the Castle (2009) gives a single player limited shots from a trebuchet (large catapult) to knock down different castles in a series of levels. Finally, Roxio took that same concept, replacing the trebuchet with a slingshot that flings birds at pig fortresses in Angry Birds (2009).
