Mission control for; former EIC of and; taking dapper (and frogs) back from the Nazis. The early days of the Game Boy were absolutely jam-packed with vintage PC games, to the point that yet another old computer conversion popping up on Game Boy Works no longer seems particularly remarkable. Yet even within this increasingly crowded field of ancient reworked PC software, this latest episode stands out: Pack-In Video's Lunar Lander definitely represents the most 'vintage' work we'll ever see on our Game Boy odyssey. The Lunar Lander concept stretches all the way back to the dim and distant year 1969.
That makes this the one official Game Boy release that can trace an original property back into the ’60s. 'Property' may be the wrong word to use here, though. The original Lunar Lander came into being during the pioneer days of computing, for a PDP-8 minicomputer, and as with most software applications of that era it doesn't appear to have been saddled with the burden of copyright. Pack-In Video more directly adapted their Game Boy release on Atari's arcade rendition of the game, which added graphics, ship rotation, and scoring challenges to the primitive text-based original. Lunar Lander for Game Boy adds even more to the Atari intepretation.
One addition, the Space Shuttle phase, does a pretty nice job of helping to modernize the concept somewhat (even if the Shuttle program had fallen out of public favor by 1990, due to the 1986 Challenger disaster). After all, the original Lunar Lander was clearly inspired by the space race of the ’60s and the 1969 moon landing.
Makes sense to modernize it by throwing in a Space Shuttle, too. The other new phase of the game, on the other hand —that one's a little harder to explain.
It feels somewhat like loopy ’50s sci-fi as you dodge moon men. But it also feels like some sort of riff on 1979's. It's pretty weird, but that's precisely what makes this episode so fascinating. Fittingly, this is also the most quintessentially Retronauts-ish episode of Game Boy Works.
Not only does it involve a fairly comprehensive dive into the history of a Game Boy product most Americans will never play ( Lunar Lander only shipped in Japan), not only does it contain a justifiable comparison to Heiankyo Alien, it also includes a prog rock connection. The opening song, the absolutely period-appropriate 'Everybody's Gone to the Moon,' was sung by Jonathan King, the guy who 'discovered' the band Genesis. It's full circle this week. By the way, if you enjoyed this retrospective, please consider supporting the! I'd love to be able to produce two of these videos per week, but that'll only be possible if we have the budget to pay more people to take on some of my other duties around here.
Benj Edwards of Technologizer has a nice summary of the history of Lunar Lander and the High School student who wrote one of the first computer games of all time. It started so many of us using computers, able to replicate lunar landings, so soon after we all watched images of the first man to step on the moon. I played this one for the first time in 1972 and it started me thinking, of imagining. That was a big deal, everyone knew computers counted things, but beyond what was being done at the time with computers it was easy to see more, especially when I wasn’t constrained by understanding how it worked, yet. I hope my students become as inspired.
Please read the article at the author’s site. I have copied it here as I am going to use it for class and many of these articles disappear within a school year. Even so, my students will be directed to read as long as it stays available. Lunar Lander games abound on every platform.
Along with Tetris and Pac-Man, the game–in which your mission is to safely maneuver your lunar module onto the moon’s surface–is one of the most widely cloned computer games of all time. But did you know that game players began touching down on the moon in Lunar Lander just months after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did so on July 20th, 1969? Today’s versions of Lunar Lander are easily taken for granted; they’re generally regarded as dinky games you can get for free–”Who would pay for that?” But the mother of all realistic space simulations wasn’t always perceived that way. In 1969, it was, in its own way, a sophisticated, ambitious piece of digital entertainment. And during the BASIC era of the 1970s and 80s, many programmers cut their teeth by attempting to program their own version of Lunar Lander. David Ahl, founder of magazine, called it “by far and away the single most popular computer game” in 1978 (and he was only talking about the text version!).
Indeed, Lunar Lander was one of the early computer games that helped define computer games. The Eagle Lands YOU ARE LANDING ON THE MOON AND HAVE TAKEN OVER MANUAL CONTROL 500 FEET ABOVE A GOOD LANDING SPOT. YOU HAVE A DOWNWARD VELOCITY OF 50 FT/SEC. 120 UNITS OF FUEL REMAIN. Among the millions who watched the was a 17 year old Massachusetts high school student named Jim Storer. In the fall of 1969, around the time of the, Storer took his inspiration to class with him.
There, he programmed a simple text-based simulation of humanity’s greatest technological achievement on his school’s. “Lexington High School had a PDP-8,” Storer recalls. “It had 8 Teletypes, a small hard drive, and 12KB of main memory, where 8KB was used by the system and 4KB time shared by the users.” Storer wrote his new program, “Lunar Landing Game,” in, a programming language for the PDP-8 that was similar in some ways to BASIC (both were introductory languages known for their ease of use). His simulation was simple, yet powerful: underneath lay a realistic set of equations Storer believes his father may have taught him. Lunar Landing Game’s gameplay consisted of a turn-based question and answer session, asking the user for the rocket fuel burn rate at each turn, which the user would then enter as a number from 0 to 200. The constraints against you were simple: HERE ARE THE RULES THAT GOVERN YOUR SPACE VEHICLE: (1) AFTER EACH SECOND, THE HEIGHT, VELOCITY, AND REMAINING FUEL WILL BE REPORTED.
(2) AFTER THE REPORT, A ‘?’ WILL BE TYPED. ENTER THE NUMBER OF UNITS OF FUEL YOU WISH TO BURN DURING THE NEXT SECOND. EACH UNIT OF FUEL WILL SLOW YOUR DESCENT BY 1 FT/SEC.
(3) THE MAXIMUM THRUST OF YOUR ENGINE IS 30 FT/SEC/SEC OR 30 UNITS OF FUEL PER SECOND. (4) WHEN YOU CONTACT THE LUNAR SURFACE, YOUR DESCENT ENGINE WILL AUTOMATICALLY CUT OFF AND YOU WILL BE GIVEN A REPORT OF YOUR LANDING SPEED AND REMAINING FUEL. (5) IF YOU RUN OUT OF FUEL, THE ‘?’ WILL NO LONGER APPEAR, BUT YOUR SECOND BY SECOND REPORT WILL CONTINUE UNTIL YOU CONTACT THE LUNAR SURFACE. Along the way, Jim Storer created one of the earliest computer games–one of a handful of text-based PDP-8 games of the 1960s, and one of the first computer simulation games ever. In less than 50 lines of code, Storer captured the imaginations of an entire generation of programmers with a gripping space drama composed of nothing more than simple text statements. Storer submitted his game to PDP-8 maker DEC, which was always looking for innovative and interesting uses of its computers. The programs were usually distributed for free or used as demonstrations to potential clients, serving as a powerful marketing tool.
At DEC, an employee named David H. Ahl translated Storer’s Lunar Lander into the BASIC language, which soon overtook FOCAL as the most popular introduction to programming. From there, both the FOCAL and BASIC versions of Storer’s simulation spread to other PDP-8 users through DEC’s EDU newsletter and through distribution by DEC’s Education Product Group. After that, Storer forgot about the game. Life went on. He never sold it, and never followed the progress or influence of its imitators as they echoed down through the years. “After leaving high school I never thought about the game again,” says Storer.
“Until about a couple of months ago when someone e-mailed me about this, I was completely unaware of any Lunar Lander game other than the one I wrote in high school.” But Storer’s computer experiences in high school shaped the rest of his career: “I became interested in computer science as a result of taking that computer class and doing programming on the PDP-8.” Storer later studied computer science as an undergraduate at Cornell University and then received his Ph.D. In Computer Science at Princeton University. He is now a professor of computer science at Brandeis University. In 1973, DEC published a book edited by Ahl called that included both Storer’s version of Lunar Lander and two others that had been inspired by Storer’s program. In 1978, Ahl revamped the book with a focus on home microcomputers that were common at the time, and it sold over a million copies. Thanks to Ahl’s book, Lunar Lander’s status as one of the classics of early computer gaming was assured. Lunar Lander Gets Graphical DEC consultant Jack Burness had long been a fan of America’s race to the moon.
He recalls with great clarity the excitement of the period: “The space program was an incredibly big project then. More than a project, it was a national embracing of the future.” Inspired by a co-worker who attended the launch of Apollo 16, Burness pestered his local senator for passes to see the launch of the, in December 1972. “A bunch of my friends went with me to see it,” recalls Burness. “It was the last launch and was at night–an overwhelming powerfully experience.” That experience simmered in the back of his mind for the next few months, and it proved influential when DEC needed a software demo for its new GT40 terminal. The DEC GT40 was a graphical computer terminal–unusual for its time, since it used a vector CRT display.
One electron gun directly drew geometric shapes on the screen, providing a potent way to generate sharp, high-resolution computer graphics with the limited computing power available at the time. Conventional bitmapped raster displays (like those on conventional TV video games) draw the screen progressively from top to bottom, one row at a time, and required vastly more memory to compose a detailed on-screen image.
“I actually had quit Digital the previous spring and moved to Cambridge to consult for Draper Labs,” says Burness. “For some now long-forgotten reason I was back consulting to DEC that winter.” Burness won the contract from DEC and began developing a lunar landing simulation for the terminal in early 1973.
He programmed the game in PDP-11 assembly language, as the GT40 contained within it a PDP-11 CPU, essentially making it a standalone computer system. “But the graphics processor had its own instruction set,” adds Burness, “and I programmed that in assembly as well.” To make a realistic simulation, Burness went straight to MIT, which had co-designed the real NASA lunar module. “It only took a few hours of perusing around to dig up enough information (weight, fuel burn rate, etc.) to write the program,” he says. As for inspiration, Burness doesn’t recall seeing Storer’s exact version of the “Lunar Landing Game,” but by 1973, clones of the Storer’s text-based simulation were already commonplace. Still, Burness’ version had one very important difference from those that had come before it: it had graphics. His game, which he called “Moonlander,” took advantage of the GT40’s vector display to draw a moonscape as seen from the side. Gameplay was simple, but challenging: The player wielded the GT40’s integrated light pen and carefully guided the lunar module’s descent by touching areas of the screen that controlled thrust.
The player attempted to land via thrusting the lunar module’s rockets in real time while avoiding too fast an entry, or too steep an angle. With Burness’ innovations, the modern action-based Lunar Lander we all know today was born. “Start of the project to completion was ten days. That’s it,” says Burness.
“When you only have a small amount of computer memory, choices become simpler.” Moonlander proved an immediate hit with DEC and other users of the GT40. From there, it spread wherever GT40s were in use, and influenced a sizable audience as one of the first graphical computer games. Years later, a co-worker told Burness that the reason he got into programming was because he had played Moonlander as a teenager. “I think it’s kind of neat the way you do something and it can have a rippling effect,” he says.
Burness never made any money on Moonlander, but his experience with the GT40 solidified his interest in computer graphics. He spent the next 26 years of his career bouncing between various computer graphics companies, and still consults for technology startups today.
:the Game: Full Screen
Landing at the Arcade Before the decade was out, one of Burness’ biggest fans brought Lunar Lander out of the halls of mainframe academia and into the commercial realm, further widening its audience: Atari. By 1979, video game pioneer Atari had been working on bringing vector technology to its arcade games for two years.
They were inspired by arcade game to develop vector hardware of their own. Rick Moncrief led the project. “Before there was a game, we had to make a vector graphic system,” recalls, an Atari engineer who co-created many Atari arcade games in the 1970s. “Rick and I worked on that. When we were done, we said ‘What should we do with it?’ I said, ‘How about we make Lunar Lander?’ With the help of Rich Moore on software, the two created Atari’s first commercial arcade game with vector graphics titled, unsurprisingly, “Lunar Lander.” As for Delman’s inspiration, he says he saw a graphical Lunar Lander game–likely Burness’ Moonlander–long before development on Lunar Lander began: “I recall going over to NASA’s –some Atari folks and I had a tour there–and they showed us a Lunar Lander game running on some machine.” But he doesn’t recall the specifics of the occasion. Atari’s Lunar Lander was very similar to Burness’ version, except that players controlled the lander with a thruster lever and two rotate buttons. Of course, to make a good arcade video game, Delman had to forgo the hardcore simulation aspect of the computer version and make it fun and simple for anyone to walk up and play.
“Not everyone is trained to land a spacecraft on the moon,” he says. The game included four play modes of varying difficulty — “One is a realistic mode like a real spaceship, and nobody could land that,” says Delman, chuckling. “But the mode it defaults to is very simple. There’s friction on your ship, and the ship only rotates when you touch the controls. We did all these things to make it easier to play.” Then there was a special button that Delman calls the “save your ass” button: “If you’re out of control, you could hit that and it would straighten out the lander, give you full thrust and try to stop you. It cost you a lot of fuel, but if all hope was lost, you could hit it.” Atari released Lunar Lander in August, 1979–just after the tenth Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Strangely, it appears that Atari didn’t capitalize on the anniversary while marketing their new machine.
It’s forgivable, because Atari’s attention was quickly diverted when another vector game’s sales started taking off like a rocket ship. Atari’s Asteroids, also released in 1979, used the same vector hardware as Lunar Lander.
Asteroids became so successful that Atari soon stopped production of Lunar Lander to start building Asteroids machines. “The first 300 Asteroids games went out with Lunar Lander artwork on the side,” recalls Delman.
Still, Atari sold about 4700 Lunar Lander machines, which Delman says was a “good run” at the time. It’s likely that Atari would have sold more Lunar Lander units if Asteroids hadn’t stolen the spotlight. Overall, it was this version of Lunar Lander by Atari that received the widest audience, and soon hobby programmers of the early software revolution began coding their own versions of the game for home computers of the time: the TRS-80, Apple II, Commodore PET, Atari 800, and other.
The trend continues on nearly every computer platform released. To this day, neither Storer or Burness have played Atari’s arcade version of their game, and neither one received any financial compensation from Atari for borrowing their idea. Burness doesn’t seem too upset with the prospect. He seems satisfied in knowing he got there first: “A co-worker told me that my Lunar Lander was actually used as an example of prior art to stop Atari from having a patent on an entire class of computer games.” After that, Lunar Lander was free to be cloned and re-cloned a million ways, ensuring that its legacy will live on for generations beyond those who created it. Notable Versions of Lunar Lander Through the Years The following list isn’t comprehensive–we would be here for weeks if I tried to account forevery version of Lunar Lander ever made. Instead, we’ll focus on some notable versions released through the years.
You can even play some of them online. So Godspeed, virtual astronauts. May the moon’s grip be gentle on your ships. Lunar Landing Game (1969) (PDP-8, by Jim Storer) It’s amazing to think that while men were landing on the moon for the first time, some people were back on Earth playing computer games. This is one of them.
Windows and Linux users can easily play Lunar Landing Game with by Lyle Kopnicky. Download the game. Rocket (circa 1971) (PDP-8, by Eric Peters) Rocket introduced a primitive graphical display that utilized a single asterisk to display altitude. It was still text based.
Windows and Linux users can easily play Rocket with. Download the game. LEM (circa 1971) (DEC PDP-8, by William Labaree II) Labaree’s version is the most complex of the text-based landing simulators. It even offers to display readouts in either English or Metric units.
Windows and Linux users can easily play LEM with. Download the game. Moonlander (1973) (DEC GT40, by Jack Burness) The original graphical Lunar Lander game. Feel free to peruse the, if you’re so inclined. Lunar Lander (1979) (Arcade, by Rich Moore and Howard Delman for Atari) Atari’s first arcade game with vector graphics. It spawned most of the clones you see today.
At Atari’s website (requires Java). Tranquility Base (1980) (Apple II, by Bill Budge) x`Before he found fame at Electronic Arts for his t, Bill Budge coded this very accurate clone of Atari’s Lunar Lander on the Apple II. It even simulates vector graphics. Jupiter Lander (1982) (VIC-20, by Hitoshi Suzuki for HAL Laboratory) While this game was also released on the Commodore 64, purists consider Suzuki’s VIC-20 version to be superior. Rocket Lander (1982) (IBM PC, by IBM) describes this as a “a good–but very rare–conversion of the hit arcade game Lunar Lander.” Lander (1990) (Windows 3.x, by George Moromisato) This is the version of Lunar Lander the author recalls most fondly. You can get it, but it needs Windows 3.1 to run properly.
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Lunar Lander (1990) (Game Boy, by Pack-In-Video Co., Ltd.) Only released in Japan, this is a rare treat for westerners–if you can find it. Lander (1999) (Windows, by Psygnosis Limited) An interesting of the classic, unique because of its commercial status. Lunar Lander (2007) (Android, by Android Open Source Project) is a sample game for Android developers created and distributed by the makers of the Android operating system.
It shows that Lunar Lander is still relevant as a demo game for beginning programmers, even today. Jupiter Lander (2008) (Mobile, by Eidos) Last year, Eidos (mentioned above) for mobile phones. Lunar Module 3D (2009) (iPhone, by Jason Pastewski and Jim Covert) The iPhone App Store hosts over ten different variations on Burness’ classic Lunar Lander game. One of the most notable is this 3D version,.
Lunar Lander (199x-present) (Flash, by everybody) Lunar Lander has lived on as a favorite game to create among Flash developers. You can find literally dozens of Flash versions of the game to play online through your web browser. That mimics Atari’s Lunar Lander arcade game.
Even the Science Channel has a on its website as part of its Apollo 11 40th anniversary celebration. Will Lunar Lander persist for another 40 years? It has classic game mechanics that will always be timeless.
But personally, I hope that we’ll be playing “Mars Lander” by then.
Go back to the days of vector graphics, and enjoy a bit of the past. You have been recruited to mine energy crystals with a 5 planet contract. Get a bonus for each planet you complete, and for completing the final planet. Crash, and your family only gets the loot collected from the previous planets. Features: Tilt (try doing that with a 400 pound arcade machine) and Button control. Auto-zooming Rotation or Side-Thrusters control Throttle on Left or Right Adjustable Star Density (Try lower density for better response time) Auto-Engine Shutdown (try it off if you find landings too easy!) Un-lockable difficulty levels Multi-Language menus (English, Thai, Japanese)???????
README.md Lunar Lander This is a port in C of the original 'Lunar Lander' video game, which is written in BASIC. Building This application depends on:.
Linux/BSD because Windows(r)(tm) is crap. Build tools.
Mainly gcc, make and some other stuff. A VT1000 compatible terminal emulator for the color output. Just run make if you have all depencies and make install to install. Make clean will clean the project up. About this game Lunar Lander was the first-ever PC game written in 1967 by a student. It was originally written in BASIC, but there are plenty of other languages out there in which this game is written. And myself are going to the same school where we had to pick a topic for a project we had to do.
We decided to write a text-based game in C. As we stumbled upon lunar-lander at we decided to write a similar program like this in C. So we took a look at the BASIC sources which we got and began writing. Now the final version of our program is finished and we are just about to begin working on a GUI version of this. Difficulty You can change the difficulty of the game using the command-line argument 'd'. The usage is: lunar-lander -d 1/2/3 Where 1 is the easiest and 3 the hardest. If you don't specify a difficulty, the easiest will be used.
Lunar Lander games abound on every platform. Along with Tetris and Pac-Man, the game–in which your mission is to safely maneuver your lunar module onto the moon’s surface–is one of the most widely cloned computer games of all time. But did you know that game players began touching down on the moon in Lunar Lander just months after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did so on July 20th, 1969? Today’s versions of Lunar Lander are easily taken for granted; they’re generally regarded as dinky games you can get for free–“Who would pay for that?” But the mother of all realistic space simulations wasn’t always perceived that way. In 1969, it was, in its own way, a sophisticated, ambitious piece of digital entertainment.
And during the BASIC era of the 1970s and 80s, many programmers cut their teeth by attempting to program their own version of Lunar Lander. David Ahl, founder of magazine, called it “by far and away the single most popular computer game” in 1978 (and he was only talking about the text version!). Indeed, Lunar Lander was one of the early computer games that helped define computer games. The Eagle Lands YOU ARE LANDING ON THE MOON AND HAVE TAKEN OVER MANUAL CONTROL 500 FEET ABOVE A GOOD LANDING SPOT. YOU HAVE A DOWNWARD VELOCITY OF 50 FT/SEC.
120 UNITS OF FUEL REMAIN. Among the millions who watched the was a 17 year old Massachusetts high school student named Jim Storer. In the fall of 1969, around the time of the, Storer took his inspiration to class with him. There, he programmed a simple text-based simulation of humanity’s greatest technological achievement on his school’s. “Lexington High School had a PDP-8,” Storer recalls. “It had 8 Teletypes, a small hard drive, and 12KB of main memory, where 8KB was used by the system and 4KB time shared by the users.” Storer wrote his new program, “Lunar Landing Game,” in, a programming language for the PDP-8 that was similar in some ways to BASIC (both were introductory languages known for their ease of use).
His simulation was simple, yet powerful: underneath lay a realistic set of equations Storer believes his father may have taught him. Lunar Landing Game’s gameplay consisted of a turn-based question and answer session, asking the user for the rocket fuel burn rate at each turn, which the user would then enter as a number from 0 to 200. The constraints against you were simple: HERE ARE THE RULES THAT GOVERN YOUR SPACE VEHICLE: (1) AFTER EACH SECOND, THE HEIGHT, VELOCITY, AND REMAINING FUEL WILL BE REPORTED.
(2) AFTER THE REPORT, A ‘?’ WILL BE TYPED. ENTER THE NUMBER OF UNITS OF FUEL YOU WISH TO BURN DURING THE NEXT SECOND.
EACH UNIT OF FUEL WILL SLOW YOUR DESCENT BY 1 FT/SEC. (3) THE MAXIMUM THRUST OF YOUR ENGINE IS 30 FT/SEC/SEC OR 30 UNITS OF FUEL PER SECOND.
(4) WHEN YOU CONTACT THE LUNAR SURFACE, YOUR DESCENT ENGINE WILL AUTOMATICALLY CUT OFF AND YOU WILL BE GIVEN A REPORT OF YOUR LANDING SPEED AND REMAINING FUEL. (5) IF YOU RUN OUT OF FUEL, THE ‘?’ WILL NO LONGER APPEAR, BUT YOUR SECOND BY SECOND REPORT WILL CONTINUE UNTIL YOU CONTACT THE LUNAR SURFACE. Along the way, Jim Storer created one of the earliest computer games–one of a handful of text-based PDP-8 games of the 1960s, and one of the first computer simulation games ever. In less than 50 lines of code, Storer captured the imaginations of an entire generation of programmers with a gripping space drama composed of nothing more than simple text statements. Storer submitted his game to PDP-8 maker DEC, which was always looking for innovative and interesting uses of its computers.
The programs were usually distributed for free or used as demonstrations to potential clients, serving as a powerful marketing tool. At DEC, an employee named David H. Ahl translated Storer’s Lunar Lander into the BASIC language, which soon overtook FOCAL as the most popular introduction to programming. From there, both the FOCAL and BASIC versions of Storer’s simulation spread to other PDP-8 users through DEC’s EDU newsletter and through distribution by DEC’s Education Product Group. After that, Storer forgot about the game. Life went on. He never sold it, and never followed the progress or influence of its imitators as they echoed down through the years.
“After leaving high school I never thought about the game again,” says Storer. “Until about a couple of months ago when someone e-mailed me about this, I was completely unaware of any Lunar Lander game other than the one I wrote in high school.” But Storer’s computer experiences in high school shaped the rest of his career: “I became interested in computer science as a result of taking that computer class and doing programming on the PDP-8.” Storer later studied computer science as an undergraduate at Cornell University and then received his Ph.D. In Computer Science at Princeton University. He is now a professor of computer science at Brandeis University.
In 1973, DEC published a book edited by Ahl called that included both Storer’s version of Lunar Lander and two others that had been inspired by Storer’s program. In 1978, Ahl revamped the book with a focus on home microcomputers that were common at the time, and it sold over a million copies. Thanks to Ahl’s book, Lunar Lander’s status as one of the classics of early computer gaming was assured. Lunar Lander Gets Graphical DEC consultant Jack Burness had long been a fan of America’s race to the moon. He recalls with great clarity the excitement of the period: “The space program was an incredibly big project then. More than a project, it was a national embracing of the future.” Inspired by a co-worker who attended the launch of Apollo 16, Burness pestered his local senator for passes to see the launch of the, in December 1972. “A bunch of my friends went with me to see it,” recalls Burness.
“It was the last launch and was at night–an overwhelming powerfully experience.” That experience simmered in the back of his mind for the next few months, and it proved influential when DEC needed a software demo for its new GT40 terminal. The DEC GT40 was a graphical computer terminal–unusual for its time, since it used a vector CRT display.
One electron gun directly drew geometric shapes on the screen, providing a potent way to generate sharp, high-resolution computer graphics with the limited computing power available at the time. Conventional bitmapped raster displays (like those on conventional TV video games) draw the screen progressively from top to bottom, one row at a time, and required vastly more memory to compose a detailed on-screen image. “I actually had quit Digital the previous spring and moved to Cambridge to consult for Draper Labs,” says Burness. “For some now long-forgotten reason I was back consulting to DEC that winter.” 1.
35 Comments For This Post. Says: Hi there and thanks for the mention! A really interesting article, I never realised the game had a life before the arcade game. I’ve just finished a 3D Lunar Lander Flash game just in time for the 40th anniversary: cheers! Seb. Says: I wrote a DSL in the Scala programming language that implements a dialect of BASIC which I then used to write a textual Lunar Lander game.
? -m. Says: I went to work for DEC in 1976 and got to play Lunar Lander on a machine in the Mill. I always crashed. If you landed successfully there was a McDonalds on the Moon. Peter Says: @Dave Barnes there was a McDonalds on the Moon.
If you landed near it, an astronaut exited the LEM and visited it. Played it at Westfield in 1976/7 and crashed, too. The tech who “owned” the system showed me the McDonalds, and helped me acquire enough scrap parts to build a VT05 to use for grad school. Richard D Says: I used to play the GT40 version and there was a McDonalds somewhere on the lunar surface.
If you landed close enough a little guy would walk to the arches and order two big macs and a cheeseburger to go. (Not 100% sure about the order!). Says: Hp-25 calculator had a simple version 49 programmable steps circa 1975. Says: Hey, thkx, Ralph. I'm writing an academic paper about my Second Life lander simulator inspired in that version I used to play on my old HP25 and I needed that reference.
You may have spared me a few hours of googling. Jim Garrison Says: I played Lunar Lander on, on a GE timesharing system (ASR33 teletype, 110 baud acoustic coupler modem).
I was a fourteen-year-old and thought I was going to be a chemical engineer. My dad called from the office and said that computer time that day (normally $50/hour) was free and I should come down and play some games. After a few games of Lunar Lander and a football simulator I asked him how it worked, and he said “just type LIST”.
The rest, as they say, is history. That day is etched in my memory, and is the day I decided to write software for a living, which I’ve been doing ever since. The system used Dartmouth BASIC and I recall the Lunar Lander program was only a few hundred lines of code, of which over half was text describing the game. Adrian Says: Here’s a nice implementation.
It’s with some equally fine exhibits at Southwold pier. brianlj Says: @Jim: HP-25, eh? I wrote a version for the TI-59 a couple of years after that. Kept it on one of those little whizz back’n’forth memory cards. Been quite a while since I thought of that.
Bill Marshak, Ph.D. Says: I was at Univ of Miami (FL) in 1970 when I played this game on Dr.
Earl Winer’s Lab 8 computer (Industrial Engineering Dept). It was a hybrid PDP-8 and analog machine which used DEC Tape, random access tape, for bulk storage. It had a vector graphic CRT (not TV raster) display. You controlled the LEM using the toggle switches on the PDP-8 face. I believe it might have been written at MIT. If you landed sucessfully (horizontal and vertical velocity within tolerance and on flat surface), Armstrong emerged, planted a flag, and said One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” If you found the MacDonalds (complete with golden arches), he went into the the restaurant and ordered (I think) “a Big Mac to Go”.
It was the first computer game I ever played, followed by the Colossal Cave on a PDP-11 and Pong. Very cool for the time! Bill Marshak. Jon Thompson Says: Austin Meyers has a mars lander already built into X-Plane.
He also talks about the physics of flight on mars here. Matt Curtis Says: I developed a character graphics-based version for USCD Pascal in the early 80s at the University of Rochester. Says: Man I remember playing that game. Back then it was so cool.
Says: Played it on a GE TSS-8 (PDP-8 time sharing system) in 1974 at high school in Pittsfield, MA. There was a version that would report crater size if you crashed. TotalForge Says: I didn’t see this fine sim mentioned, if you have a windows machine you are in for a treat. Bill Baxter Says: What!? No mention of Gravitar!? It was kind of a Lunar Lander + Asteroids hybrid. I never could get past the first level, but I loved that game for some reason.
Bob Says: Oi! You’ve missed out an entire generation of these games between ’82 and ’90! Have you ever heard of 8-bit Thrust?
Firebird released awful versions of this for C64, ZXSpec and AMX, none of which compared to the 16 bit mastery that was Oids. A fine retrospective on the early history, but there’s a whole generation missing here. BDD Says: I wrote a Lunar Lander years ago, for the TRS-80 Model III, in BASIC. I’ve had a similar game in the back of my mind, where the player would land on other planets, and in the case of the gas and ice giants, drop a probe into the atmosphere or jettison a satellite. If you got too far into the atmosphere, you’d be crushed.
I may still write it one day; maybe for the Dreamcast, as a goof. Wout Mertens Says: This prompted me to hunt for a game for IBM that I absolutely loved: “Lunar Module”. I couldn’t find it unfortunately. You had to take off and land on a vector-based 2D moon surface, killing evil turrets that tried to shoot you down with bullets.
It included a level editor, my favorite level was humongous and included some very steep drops. It had unlimited fuel and ammo so maybe it’s not a strict descendant. Must have been from around 1990. Ah the memories. Says: hey there awesome write up A really interesting article keep penning more be well TD. Bruce B. Says: I remember a fantastic Lunar Lander simulator running on Control Data 6000 series mainframes around 1970 (one of the most powerful computer systems of the time at Purdue.
The operator’s console, consisting of two vector CRT displays was the interface. One display would be a view port out of the lander show a star-field and the moon; the other display was an instrument panel, all running in real time.
Control was via assigned keyboard keys for fuel flow, thrusters, etc. I can’t tell you the number of hours “invested” in honing our skills of a very realistic, demanding program during non-production hours. Hypocee Says: My favorite adaptation for Windows is Gravity Well: – analog thrust, classic graphics, progressively tough gravity. Says: I wrote a Lunar Lander graphics program for the Sharp PC1500 computer. I used the built-in BASIC and a bit of 6502C assembler to do the graphics. At first it was just a dot going left to right. As you got closer to the landing site, you turned the thin but wide display on its side to represent landing.
All in 4K bytescor! Ahh we had so much fun in the 1980s.
?. Says: I still have a TTY printout of the source code as well as an instance of playing the game from 1980.
Russ Greenlaw Says: The late 60s origin must be wrong. I played LL on a 1957 text-only vacuum tube and paper tape computer in 1964/65 period. Pdf farsi to word converter. Game had to have been well known (even public domain) by then, did require a dedicated or non-batch (that is interactive) environment; I played it on a machine with no operating system, just a floating point interpreter (a bit like a cross between assembler and BASIC); do not recall whether LL game ran under FP interpreter or was stand-alone. Game printed out a line at a time as you descended to the moon and adjusted your burn rate – looked pretty much like the BASIC run on the Atari listing under wikipedia. My guess LL dates from 1958 or perhaps 1960. Can anyone provide an older example?.
Grant Philpott Says: What is the name of the Space Lander type game that also has Space Invader shapes attacking you? You had to land in about 3 places and also go up as well. It's such a long time ago!. Says: It included a level editor, my favorite level was humongous and included some very steep drops. Cortex Says: You've forgotten a very very weird occurrence of that game: In the real Sega Pinball game Apollo XIII released in 1995, inspired by the motion picture, there was, outside the fabulous 13-ball multiball mode, a moon landing video mode Smile!
HB. Says: Thanks for posting these Adrian Here's a nice implementation. It's with some equally fine exhibits at Southwold pier. Says: That day is etched in my memory, and is the day I decided to write software for a living, which I've been doing ever sincet was kind of a Lunar Lander + Asteroids hybrid. I never could get past the first level, but I loved that game for some reason.
I. Says: i have a taito lunar rescue.
Cabinet machine. Like to no more about it. Says: I HAVE A TAITO 1979 LUNAR RESCUE. COCKTAIL MACHINE.
I WOULD LIKE TO NO MORE ABOUT IT. I LIVE IN THE UK. MY NUMBER IS 0. MY NAME IS ANDY.
Says: i have a TAITO LUNAR RESCUE 1979 COCKTAIL MACHINE. LIKE TO NO MORE ABOUT IT. U CAN CALL ME ON 0.
Says: Great Article, perhaps some if you guys might like to check out the game I am developing called Lunar Flight. 14 Trackbacks For This Post. Says: beauty contests, and it has a pretty weak storyline unless you have a magnificent imagination, but Lunar Lander may well be one of the oldest time-wasters in.
Says: Forty Years of Lunar Lander Lunar Lander games abound on every platform. Along with Tetris and Pac-Man, the game–in which your mission is to. Says: beauty contests, and it has a pretty weak storyline unless you have a magnificent imagination, but Lunar Lander may well be one of the oldest time-wasters in. Says: from space computers to space computer games, the Technologizer has a great piece about a well loved space game, Lunar Lander. This game started out as a. Says: for the nerds: Forty Years of Lunar Lander How They Built it: The Software of Apollo 11 How powerful was the Apollo 11 computer?
Apollo. Says: Skoraj nemogoče je bilo v zadnjem mesecu prezreti evforično in medijsko izredno dobro pokrito praznovanje obletnice prvega človeškega pristanka na luni – Apollo 11. Ravno pod vplivom Apollo misij je najstnik Jim Storer sprogramiral eno izmed prvih računalniških iger – Lunar Lander v jeziku FOCAL. Jezik POCAL je bil napisan za Digitalove PDP-8 računalnike. Malo obširnejši članek na to temo:. Says: Forty Years of Lunar Lander Forty Years of Lunar Lander.
Says: The First Great Computer Game - Lunar Lander Forty Years of Lunar Lander. Says: simple proposition there — it's just gravity and you. Lunar Lander, which got its start back in 1969, kicked off the cave-flyer genre that boasts many great games under its banner. IOS developer.
Says: simple proposition there — it's just gravity and you. Lunar Lander, which got its start back in 1969, kicked off the cave-flyer genre that boasts many great games under its banner.
IOS developer. Says: the simple proposition there — it’s just gravity and you. Lunar Lander, which got its start back in 1969, kicked off the cave-flyer genre that boasts many great games under its banner. IOS developer. Says: simple proposition there — it's just gravity and you. Lunar Lander, which got its start back in 1969, kicked off the cave-flyer genre that boasts many great games under its banner.
IOS developer. Says: the simple proposition there — it’s just gravity and you. Lunar Lander, which got its start back in 1969, kicked off the cave-flyer genre that boasts many great games under its banner.
IOS developer. Says: the simple proposition there — it’s just gravity and you. Lunar Lander, which got its start back in 1969, kicked off the cave-flyer genre that boasts many great games under its banner. IOS developer.
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