In this game it was the challenge to not land but rather pick up pods from a Lunar Surface while avoiding missiles fired from gun turrets. By the mid to late 80’s some elements of gameplay could still be found in games such as Superior Software’s ‘Thrust’.
More arcade focused games and the move away from BASIC to faster machine code programming would see the end of the Lunar Lander as a gaming force. However it was this Atari Lunar Lander that created the template for the later graphic clones and game variants. Despite this simplification the game met with limited success in the arcades. To make the game fun for an arcade audience the hardcore physics were removed. Based on the vector graphics hardware designed for Atari’s earlier ‘Space Wars’, Atari’s Lunar Lander contained all the game play of Burness’s simulation. In 1978, when home microcomputers and text based Lunar Landers were making their way into people’s homes, Engineers Rich Moore and Howard Delman were busy preparing Atari’s corporations seminal arcade version of the game. It ensured Burness’s new realistic simulation ‘Moonlander’ was not only novel for its use of a vector graphics display but also for its incorporation of a light pen as the main control mechanism.
The DEC GT40 was a graphical computer terminal addition for the PDP-11 minicomputer. In 1973 Jack Burness, a consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, produced possibly the first real-time graphical Lunar Lander for the DEC GT40. Text based Lunar Landers got the ball rolling, and it wasn’t long before the simulation entered the graphical world. Ahl would translate into BASIC and help popularise in ‘101 BASIC Computer Games’. Jim submitted his game to Digital where it was incorporated into education and promotional materials for the companies PDP-8 minicomputers. Jim had written the very first documented incarnation of Lunar Lander in the FOCAL programming language back in 1969. While working there he was exposed to a version of the game written by a high school student, Jim Storer. Ahl got his ideas for the Lunar Landers through his prior job at Digital Equipment Corporation. The book was a re-coding of Ahl’s earlier work, ‘101 BASIC Computer Games’ which was originally published in 1973 targeting the BASIC dialect found on Digital Equipment Corporation’s minicomputers.ĭavid H. They were easy enough to adapt to other BASIC flavours. The program listings in ‘BASIC Computer Games Microcomputer Edition’ were targeted at a generic Microsoft BASIC implementation. The book contained 101 BASIC type in programs, and of these, three listings were dedicated to Lunar Lander variants. Ahl’s book ‘BASIC Computer Games Microcomputer Edition’, a popular early BASIC listing type-in source, that was available on shelves in 1978. While there was an endless supply of Lander clones, one of the most popular sources of the game was released by Creative Computing magazine. Though perhaps it was the relative simplicity of programming a simple BASIC Lunar Lander game that propelled the simulation subgenre to absolute stardom. Adaptations stuck as closely as possible to real world physics, including such elements as spacecrafts orientation (both horizontal and vertical), velocities and fuel consumption. Complexity levels of the early type-in microcomputer implementations varied from the absurdly simple, to wildly complicated. The most obvious way to learn about a Lander game would have been through a type-in programs listing, either from a magazine article or a book on the BASIC computer language. A simple enough premises, but complicated enough to be addictive.
Players would input rocket thrust settings and the burn times required to combat a moon’s gravity. The earliest Lunar Lander games and simulations were turn based, text only, question and answer affairs. The primary mission was to guide the humble craft to the surface of the the moon (or other celestial bodies) without killing the crew in a fiery explosion. These armchair moon mission would capture the imagination and precious clock cycles of many early home computer owners.Īlthough there were variations, at the core all early Lunar Lander games placed the player at the command of a Lunar Excursion Module on its final descent out of orbit. A sub-genre of simulation games soon to be known as Lunar Landers was taking to the skies on every early micro computer imaginable.
In late 1972, as Apollo Space Missions were winding down a burgeoning virtual space race was busily preparing for launch.