BZFlag

Tanks have the ability to drive through other tanks, but cannot travel through buildings or other world objects. The basic objective is to destroy opponents' tanks, which are tanks of another team's color. Since all players can see the position of all the tanks on their radar, it is a game of outmaneuvering rather than sneaking.

There are styles of game play that modify the objective. Styles are server-based, as the server operator chooses what style to host. If there is no special style indicated by the server owner, the only objective is the above (to simply kill opponent tanks); it is called a "free for all", or "FFA" for short.

Inspired by Battlezone, BZFlag was first written in C by Chris Schoeneman in 1992 as a part of his studies at Cornell University. BZFlag was initially called "BZ" and despite its similarity to the SGI game of the same title by Chris Fouts, the games are completely independent of each other.

In 1993, BZFlag was released to the public for the first time. This release took a new turn compared to older versions after a cheater, who edited the source code of his client to give himself powers that do not come from official releases, inspired Schoeneman and Pasetto to add "super-flags." Super flags affect a tank's performance by adding abilities or weapons to its arsenal. The first four flags were High Speed (boosted tank speed), Quick Turn (tank turned faster), Rapid Fire (shots moved faster), and Oscillation Overthruster (tank could go through objects).

BZFlag was selected in Summer 2015 as "HotPick" by Linux Format. BZFlag was selected as the SourceForge.net Project of the Month for April 2004. Both Free Software Magazine and Linux Magazine noted that BZFlag was fun to play and suitable for younger gamers. BZFlag was a finalist in Computer Gaming World's Strategy Games category at ZDNet's 7th Annual Shareware Awards.