Battle City and Tanks 1990 History: Tank Battalion to Browser Tanks

Millions of people grew up playing a tank game they knew only as 'Tanks' or 'Tank 1990' — a fixture of cheap plug-in consoles that never carried a maker's name. The real story runs through a 1980 arcade cabinet, a landmark 1985 Famicom release from one of gaming's most important studios, and a flood of bootleg cartridges that carried the game to corners of the world it was never officially sold in. Here is where Tanks 1990 actually came from.

It began with Tank Battalion (1980)

The lineage starts in the arcades. In 1980, Namco — the Japanese studio behind Galaxian, Galaga, Pac-Man and Dig Dug — released Tank Battalion, a single-screen arcade game in which you drove a tank, shot enemy tanks, and defended a base from waves of attackers. It was basic, but it established the core idea that everything since has been built on: a tank, a maze, a base to protect, and an endless supply of enemies pouring in to destroy it.

Battle City (1985) defined the genre

The game the world remembers arrived five years later. On 9 September 1985, Namco released Battle City for the Family Computer (the Japanese NES). On paper it was a port of Tank Battalion, but it improved almost every part of the game so thoroughly that it is better thought of as a sequel. It was produced by Takefumi Hyoudou, programmed by Ryoichi Ohkubo and scored by Junko Ozawa — a Namco sound pioneer who also wrote music for Dig Dug and Mappy. Where the arcade original was stiff, Battle City ran in rock-solid 60 frames per second, making it feel leaps and bounds smoother than anything before it.

What Battle City added

Battle City introduced the features now considered iconic. The battlefield gained destructible terrain: brick walls you could shoot through, steel walls you could not break without upgrading, water you could not cross, ice that made you slide, and trees you could hide in. Killing a flashing tank dropped a power-up — a star to upgrade your cannon, a grenade to clear the screen, a helmet shield, a clock to freeze the enemy, a shovel to armour your base and an extra-life tank. And the enemy tanks came in distinct types — basic, fast, power and armoured — each with its own behaviour and toughness.

Thirty-five stages and the eagle

A stage was cleared by destroying all twenty enemy tanks that fed in from the top of the screen, after which you advanced to a new layout. The original ran to 35 stages, and once you finished them the maps looped. Through it all you defended the eagle at the bottom of the field: a single shell touching it ended the game instantly — and, memorably, your own tank could destroy your base too, so a careless shot could lose a game you were winning.

A level editor in 1985

Remarkably for the era, the home version shipped with a built-in construction mode — a level editor that let players design and play their own battlefields once they had beaten the 35 originals. It was one of the earliest NES-family games to include such a feature, decades before user-made levels became commonplace, and it is a big part of why the game had such staying power.

How 'Battle City' became 'Tank 1990'

Here is the twist: Battle City was released only in Japan. Its worldwide fame came almost entirely through unofficial channels — it was copied onto countless bootleg multicarts that shipped with cheap Famicom-clone consoles. In Russia and Eastern Europe in particular it was bundled with the hugely popular Dendy famiclone, where it effectively raised a generation of players. On those carts it carried names like 'Tank 1990,' 'Tank A 1990' or simply 'Tanks' rather than its real title — which is exactly why so many people know and search for the game by those names today.

Legacy — and playing it now

Namco followed Battle City with the 1991 arcade game Tank Force, but it is Battle City that endured, especially as a beloved two-player co-op experience and through its countless clones and remakes. The version on this page keeps the parts that made it a classic — the destructible brick, the unbreakable steel, the eagle you must defend, the stacking star upgrades and the screen-clearing power-ups — and adds a modern endless mode where tanks attack from every border. It is the same tank battle a generation grew up on, free in your browser.