Players move their tanks through a maze on screen, avoiding mines and shooting each other. The tanks are controlled by two joysticks in a dual configuration. Pushing both joysticks will move the player's tank forward, and pulling them both back causes the tank to stop. Moving the right joystick forward while pulling the left joystick back will cause the tank to turn right, while reversing the motion will cause the tank to turn left. The players are represented by one black and one white tank sprite, and mines are denoted by an "X". Points are scored by shooting the opponent or when a player runs over a mine; the player with the highest score at the end of the time limit wins the game. Tank was also one of very few games to be ported onto 1st generation consoles, usually under the title "Tank Battle".
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You have Kee Games to thank for gaming's original tank controls. I mean, it's in the name. But more than that, Steve Bristow's simpler take on the 1-on-1 vehicular combat of Spacewar! would end up saving Atari. Pong may have started that company's rise to fame, but the Pong market crash around the turn of 1974, plus the successful but loss-leading Gran Trak 10, put Bushnell & Dabney's venture on thin ice. The upstart, rockstar company that had made video games a fad almost met its demise, if not for the efforts of the affiliated company Bristow worked at.
Though technically a subsidiary of Atari, Kee Games had unique management and technical staff, such as experienced coin-op techie Bristow. They profited off of Pong clones while even Atari's originals couldn't, making waves in regions where Atari couldn't distribute. And then Tank happened. It quickly grew in popularity at trade shows and location tests, soon displacing the ailing Pong-likes that had flooded arcade and jukebox venues over the last year and a half. Atari's own Gran Trak 10, a revolution in arcade gaming, struggled to compete. What was so different this time?
Obviously this was and remains a very simple action game. You use two sticks to rotate or move back and forth, much like operating any construction or military treaded vehicle. But like Gran Trak, you weren't just shooting at the other player on an almost entirely black screen. The "course", or maze in Tank's case, let players strategize and tactically move towards and around each other. You could play mind games and take risky shots like never before, not even in then complex faire like Quadrapong. Just as fighting games today each have a meta, Bristow's game encouraged a similar kind of community learning and one-upmanship far beyond mere table tennis. The more complex controls didn't throw arcade-goers off—if anything, that added sense of realism or simulation made it more approachable.
In turn, Tank had finally achieved the "Spacewar! for the public" dream that Pitts & Tuck, Syzygy/Nutting, and then Atari had sought. Kee Games would sell more than a hundred thousand boards and cabinets through 1974 and beyond. Because Atari owned them with 90% company stock, this provided a financial and commercial boon. Tank and Gran Trak would, in tandem, prove that video games were more than a transient trend—coin-op businesses could expect these contraptions to improve, invent, and immerse their customers well beyond Pong.
Tank and its iterative sequels were so foundational for Atari & Kee Games that it would later influence their first multi-game cartridge console. The Atari VCS specifically borrows its iconic joystick design from a Tank II mini-console prototype, and an expanded port of Tank dubbed Combat was the main pack-in launch title alongside the system in 1977. While this may be as rudimentary as vehicular dueling has ever been, even compared to its space-borne predecessors, Tank's earned its place in arcade & video game history.