Scorched Earth is one of many games in the genre of turn-based artillery games. Such games are among the earliest computer games, with versions existing for mainframes with only teletype output. Scorched Earth, with a plethora of weapon types and power-ups, is considered the modern archetype of its format. The game has a wide variety of customization options from gravity and wind to money and meteorite showers, and a similarly large pool of different payloads,
allowing for a large amount of entirely different situations.