Battalion

Battalion is a freeware OpenGL-powered arcade-action game by Andy Johnson in which you pick one of four giant monsters and rampage through a small town, smashing buildings and toppling skyscrapers while a panicked military rolls in tanks, jets, artillery shells, and energy weapons to try to stop you.

Monsters versus the military

The pitch, in the author's own words, is "monsters, explosions and senseless destruction." You stomp, smash, and breath-weapon your way through cars and skyscrapers; the army responds with shells and beams that escalate the longer you stay on screen.

Origin and OpenGL port

Battalion was originally written by Andy Johnson at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (UIC) for Silicon Graphics workstations, then ported to most flavors of UNIX and finally to the Macintosh. It uses OpenGL for hardware-accelerated 3D and falls back to a smaller software-rendered window when no card is available.

System requirements

Version 1.4 runs on classic Mac OS 8, 8.1, or 9 on either 68k or PowerPC hardware, with 3 MB of RAM and 3 MB of disk free. The release notes call out roughly 2x speed gains on 68k Macs over earlier builds, though a Power Mac is still strongly recommended.

License and home

Battalion is freeware, with permission granted for inclusion on Info-Mac CD-ROM compilations. The original homepage at evlweb.eecs.uic.edu/aej/AndyBattalion.html documents the broader cross-platform port history.