Someone rebuilt Scorched Earth 2000 for the web, and yes, it works. The tank-shooting, wind-calculating, weapon-shopping artillery game from my childhood is now a click away at scorch2000.com. No installer, no DOSBox gymnastics, just open the tab and lob a Funky Bomb at your friend.
What makes this a good port isn't nostalgia — it's that the original design holds up. Turn-based artillery is basically the proto-Worms, proto-Angry Birds formula. You pick angle, power, weapon. You eat dirt or you don't. The loop is tight enough that a 90s game still feels honest in 2024 without needing a battle pass bolted on.
The browser part matters more than people give it credit for. WebAssembly and modern Canvas mean you can ship a near-native experience without asking anyone to trust your .exe. For preservation, this is huge — old games rot when the platforms underneath them die, and the web is the closest thing we have to a stable substrate.
If you've got ten minutes and a coworker willing to play hot-seat, go fire a Nuke. Sometimes the right move is to stop chasing the new thing and replay the old one that already nailed it.
