To get into the Hall of Fame a shot has to be witnessed by at least three members, and at least one of the witnesses has to have been on the receiving end. Nominations are made at lunch the same day. Nobody remembers anything the next day.

THE BASEMENT  March 1996
REBAR's predecessor (we'll call him the Intern) had parked on the edge of a cliff with a full shield and was taking shots at everybody. DEAD LOAD fired a single Digger into the face of the cliff below him. The cliff went. The Intern went. He had bought shields and no parachutes. There was a forty-minute discussion of whether a tank that dies by falling into a hole was killed by the man who dug the hole. It was decided that it was. This is now Rule 4. The Intern went back to school in the fall and, we hear, into geotechnical engineering, which we think is the right call.

THE LONG BABY  November 1997
LIVE LOAD (me) to THE PRINCIPAL, all the way from the far left of the screen to the far right, with a Baby Missile, against a strong wind, first shot. I will not pretend it was anything but luck. I will, however, mention it in every performance review I have for the rest of my career.

THE DRAINAGE PROBLEM  June 1998
CANTILEVER fired Napalm uphill at SHEAR WALL. It landed short. It ran back down the hill and pooled around CANTILEVER. He watched the whole thing happen and said only "that's a grading issue." Two rounds later he did it again.

THE FROG  February 1999
REBAR, a Leapfrog, three tanks lined up on one slope: SHEAR WALL, CANTILEVER, THE PRINCIPAL. First warhead, second warhead, third warhead. One, two, three. REBAR stood up and walked out of the break room and didn't come back until 12:55. It was the right thing to do. There was nothing left to say.

ROUND FIVE, TURN ONE  April 1999
For five rounds, THE PRINCIPAL had bought nothing but Baby Missiles and saved his money, and we knew why. Round five, turn one, he bought a Death's Head and fired it, and the landscape was rewritten, and when the dirt settled, he was the only tank still there. Then he went to a client lunch. He did not come back for rounds six through ten and so did not win the lunch, but it is the only round of Scorched Earth he has ever won with everyone watching, and he talks about it.

THE BURIED MAN  August 1999
SHEAR WALL buried himself in dirt, on purpose, under a shield, and waited while the rest of us destroyed each other, until there was nobody left but him and REBAR. Then he tried to dig out with a Digger and dug straight down, which put him deeper. REBAR dropped a Nuke on the hole. The shield held. REBAR dropped another one. SHEAR WALL has since described the strategy as sound and the execution as a construction defect.

Scorched Earth makes the tanks talk: a little line of text over the tank when it fires and when it dies. The lines come from plain text files on the disk, and you can edit them. In 1996 we threw out the ones that came with the game and wrote our own. These are the ones on the league disk now. The firm's office manager has read every one. They are office-safe. That was a condition.

WHEN FIRING:

WHEN DYING:

The office's favorite, by a show of hands in July, is FAILURE MODE: DUCTILE. For the non-engineers: a ductile failure is the good kind. It bends a long way and gives everybody plenty of warning before it goes. It's what we design for. It's also how REBAR loses.

THE COMPUTER TANKS. Rule 7 keeps them out of league play, but on a practice lunch with three of us we'll fill the empty seats with computer players. The game lets you pick what kind. The one called the Moron is supposed to be the easy one. In April, on a practice lunch, a Moron won four rounds in a row against LIVE LOAD, CANTILEVER and THE PRINCIPAL. We do not count practice lunches. We are counting this one here, once, so that it is on the record, and then we will never speak of it again.