BattleTanx

• Release Date: December 29, 1998
• Genre: Shooter
• Style: Vehicle Shooter
• Similar Games: Assault Rigs (PlayStation), Cyber Sled (PlayStation), Assault Rigs (IBM PC Compatible), Steel Reign (PlayStation), Combat (Atari Video Computer System), Combat (Arcade), Tokyo Wars (Arcade), Tiny Tank: Up Your Arsenal (PlayStation)

Game Description

The 3DO Company's first Nintendo 64 release is a 3D tank shooter not unlike the arcade hit Tokyo Wars. The title takes place in the future after a plague wipes out 90% of the world's female population. Gangs have now formed to find the extremely precious female survivors and crown them as their queens (referred to as QueenLords). Yet these aren't your ordinary street gangs; each member drives one of three types of armored vehicles: M1A1 Abrams, Goliath, or MotoTank (similar to a motorcycle).

BattleTanx is played from either a perspective behind your tank or a first-person viewpoint looking outside the hatch. As you drive through war-torn cities such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Las Vegas (including Area 51), you'll notice authentic locales such as San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf or New York's Times Square. The buildings aren't there for show, so go ahead and lay waste to whatever strikes your fancy!

BattleTanx offers fully-interactive environments, allowing players to destroy structures, cars, roadside locations and other city details to reveal secret paths or power-ups. The five game modes offered include Campaign, Annihilation, BattleLord, Family Mode, and Death Match. Campaign has you playing the role of Griffin Spade as he journeys across seventeen levels (divided into campaigns) to defeat any gang members standing in his way. Spade is searching for the whereabouts of Madison, his girlfriend, who is rumored to be somewhere in San Francisco.

In between campaigns are bonus stages, allowing you to climb inside a Goliath tank to eliminate as many waves of enemies as you can before dying. At the end of each bonus round, you'll receive a ranking and score relative to your performance. The rest of the game modes involve various forms of multiplayer battles, from Capture the Flag variants to standard elimination-style formats, each supporting up to four players as well as the option of having computer-controlled teams.

Players can choose between nine different gangs with ratings in speed, firepower, armor, and intelligence: Skull Riderz, After Shocks, Nuclear Knights, Urban Decay, Griffin's Army, Charlie Co., Dark Angels, Mech Manaics, and the Psycho Brigade. Gamers can battle in one of eight multiplayer arenas, which can all be customized to include power-ups, unlimited ammo, different difficulty levels and multiple control schemes.

BattleTanx includes Easy, Driver, Gunner, and Arcade setups, which differ in how much of the tank players can control, including whether or not the turret moves independently of the vehicle. Among the fifteen power-ups available are swarmers, guided missiles (which can be directed using the control stick), lasers, nukes, cloaking devices, mines, and grenades. The game also includes support for both the Rumble Pak and Controller Pak accessories.

Roots & Influences

While there is a single-player campaign, BattleTanx is first and foremost a multiplayer title, one that was designed to address the system's lack of four-player simultaneous games as of 1998. According to Nintendo Power, 3DO's President Trip Hawkins went to Howard Lincoln (then Chairman of Nintendo of America) to ask what genres were missing on the Nintendo 64.

Since the topic of multiplayer games was brought up, it was decided that The 3DO Company's first title for the system would be one that focused on the interaction between four players. Of course, tank games aren't unique to the console world; the pack-in game for the Atari 2600 was Combat, which let two players fight with tanks (from a top-down perspective) as they negotiated the barriers forming the single-screen playing field.

Production Credits

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