In the game, two players drive tanks through a maze viewed from above while attempting to shoot each other and avoid mines, represented by X marks, in a central minefield.

Tank was designed by Steve Bristow, who had previously worked with the founders of Atari on Computer Space, the first arcade video game, and was developed by Lyle Rains.

It was created as part of Bristow's vision to move the company away from only producing copies of Atari's games into also developing original titles.

The game was commercially successful, selling over 10,000 units and buoying Atari's then-troubled finances.

Rains added the maze and central minefield to the game design and developed the final hardware, including the simple control scheme.

[6] Tank was one of the first games to use integrated circuit-based memory—specifically, mask ROM (read-only memory)—to store graphical data, rather than the diode arrays that previous arcade games used; it is sometimes claimed in sources to be the very first, but was preceded at minimum by Atari's Gran Trak 10 (1974).

[5][10] Tank was a commercial success and is credited with buoying the finances of the newly merged Atari at a critical time for the company.

[11] Atari produced a second version of the game, a cocktail cabinet form in which the two players sat across a circular table from each other.

[15] A sequel, Tank II, was released in 1974 to sales of around 1,000 units; gameplay was identical, though the maze could be changed to a new format by modifying the circuitry and more sound effects were added.

[22] A dedicated console version of Tank II was announced by Atari at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1977, but was cancelled by the end of the year; the joysticks for the game, designed by Kevin McKinsey, became the standard joystick controllers for the Atari 2600 (1977).

According to Battlezone designer Ed Rotberg, his concept was to update Tank with the advent of vector graphics in the arcades.