Omega was essentially a rudimentary IDE - a shell that offered several subsystems: a tank designer, a script editor, and a runtime arena for the actual combat. This was cool stuff, but what made it freakishly addictive was the primitive online component -- with a modem you could dial up to the Origin BBS and hang out with fellow players to share strategies and scripts, and most importantly -- share tanks for running in your arena. Furthermore, Origin hosted tournaments whereby players could submit their own tanks for running in the master arena round robin, with the winner getting... well, I didn't win so I don't recall!