In Atari’s 1980 arcade game Battlezone, the player controls a tank.
Battlezone places the player in a first-person armored vehicle and uses wireframe graphics to represent a three-dimensional battlefield. The tank moves across a landscape, searches for enemy vehicles and fires shells while avoiding incoming attacks. The cabinet’s two joysticks control movement and aiming, creating a physical control scheme unusual for its time.
The game was designed by Ed Rotberg and released in 1980. Battlezone is particularly significant because its wireframe perspective helped demonstrate how arcade hardware could suggest a 3D environment. Its tank subject also made it attractive for military-training experiments, although the arcade version was designed primarily as entertainment.