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Forty Years of Lunar Lander
Harry writes "2009 marks not only the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11, but also four decades of the iconic, omnipresent Lunar Lander, one of the first simulation games ever written. The first version was written by an Apollo-crazy high school student; among its countless descendants are the classic Atari arcade machine and versions for practically every other platform, from the Apple II to the iPhone. We're celebrating with a look at the game's origins, history, and significance — including an interview with creator Jim Storer, who hadn't given the game a moment's thought since he left high school, and wasn't aware of the phenomenon he spawned."
I would like to take this moment to remind everyone how fucking cool America is for landing on the moon.
It was in the early eighties, and I had a TRS-80. Bought a Moon lander game for it at a Radio Shack and it sucked donkey balls, so I wrote my own. The difference between my moon lander and radio Shack's was the same as the difference between a violin and a fiddle.
What's the difference between a violin and a fiddle?
People LIKE fiddle music!
Free Martian Whores!
As a child I kept searching for the version that let you land on the planet of those evil space invaders for an epic fight to the death - spacewar and asteroids were a poor facsimile.
bomb the us up set someone
...creator Jim Storer, who hadn't given the game a moment's thought since he left high school, and wasn't aware of the phenomenon he spawned.
Yeah. It's always strange when a geek escapes the darkness of the computer cave to explore the big blue room and doesn't come back. Worse, if he does come back, he'll discover that he's become stupider than before.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I grew up watching this stuff as a kid. The America we had back then is a far cry from that we have today. Gone is the self reliant take responsibility for one's self and actions. Now we have the wealth envy its not fair someone who works harder has more stuff crowd that can only relive the accomplishments of past generations because all they have nothing to show for themselves (mainly because it would require DOING SOMETHING)
when all the money is sucked up by wants there really isn't much for doing something new and exciting like the moon landings.
Yes, totally OT. But seeing the fact that forty years later and we can't do it now because of money which is better spent in the eyes of politicians on people sitting on their ass all day.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Currently on a boardwalk somewhere in England, Hack-a-Day posted this link last week: http://www.lushprojects.com/lunarlander/>http://www.lushprojects.com/lunarlander/
The main reason why you took manual control of the vehicle.... XEROX built the on board computer! And it broke... (tisk)
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
last I was there, a few years ago, disney quest (a 5 story arcade in orlando, with a retro section), had the original game. My friends were playing all the "cool" games while I camped out at Lunar Lander all night. It was one of the few open....
How can you not be aware of any lunar lander games and be a scholar and professor of computer science? I don't buy his story. He's either not telling the truth or really is an ignoramus.
My first memory of this game was seeing the Atari version at the Exploratorium. I never knew that the original was text!
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.
Reading that, I was expecting (3) to be "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Well, a fiddle is a crude folk instrument or a medieval precursor to the voilin, and a violin is a sophisticated, nuanced instrument that the fiddle is a crude imitation of. So your version was a bit of a fiddle?
Wait....
http://www.frontiernet.net/~imaging/lunar_lander_game.html
http://sebleedelisle.com/games/moonlander/
http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/media/lunar_lander/
Copying the original text Lunar Lander was my first experience with BASIC. I just typed the program in from a copy of Creative Computing in I think Applesoft BASIC. I was great at typing it, not so good at playing it.
My arcade video game experience started with Computer Space around 1972 so I was in the right generation to take part in the video game madness of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I really liked the Atari Lunar Lander and still miss the wonderful sharpness of vector graphics.
My sister project, Flyin' Irons (a lander racing game set in a world of flying steam irons), is more playable as a game at the moment.
Wow, flying steam irons. You must've played too much Megamania as a young'un.
40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing
Nice game too!
I forget which version did this, but when you pressed a certain key you got a high negative thrust and your fuel went up. So if you had room and were low on fuel, you could accelerate towards the surface and gain some fuel. I think it was the version for the Commodore PET.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
NASA faked it. It was built in a secret government facility in New Mexico by green aliens.
Okay, so these Mexicans ate some bad burritos or what?
My blog
...and I finally have the high score!
Just realised I phrased that badly - for clarification, the sister project is *not* written by me but by Anthony, the Disintegrator guy! I think he's more a project-finisher than I am :-)
Well, you know what would have been cool? Hearing the first words from the surface of the Moon.. only problem is, the Finnish national broadcaster was so amateurish, they completely missed Neil's first words forty years ago: Epic YLE fail. At least the game will let us relive that moment, right? ;-)
"My sister project, Flyin' Irons"
- I should clarify that I meant the sister project to "my" project, not that Flyin' Irons was also my project! Another, very productive, developer has been responsible for pushing Flyin' Irons to a more playable state than my game ever was.
In the '70s, my Dad brought home a teletype terminal with an acoustic coupler from work. He let us play Lunar Lander. It was a Honeywell timeshare system.
After each game, you got a comment. When you crashed, it might be "What was that flash, Wilber?"
And my favorite, when I finally got it right, "Like a honeybee alighting on a nectar filled hibiscus."
Them was the days.
madmac
I seem to have ended up at -1, Offtopic, so I guess I must have upset some people. Just thought I'd link to some relevant information that I'd collected and thought might be of interest. The main blog link is about a whole genre of games that were inspired by lander-style physics, ranging throughout various styles and platforms. It happens to be on my site, which doesn't carry any adverts - I did think about posting Anonymous but I rather thought it'd be better / more reasonable to state my interest in the site up-front.
However, I see there's a +4, Insightful one liner post about how awesome the USA is for landing on the moon. If that's /on/ topic, I'm guess I'm glad to be off it ;-)
I remember playing it a few times in the early '70s, late at night, on one of our CDC 6600s. It existed as a 'diagnostic test' on one of the maintenance boot tapes. (It threw the operator's console into graphics mode, so there was no background, play anytime version.)
..How many times I wrote that game on my little Sinclair computer as a kid. Probably my first game, and first completed, functional program.
It was too annoying saving it onto tapes so I usually just reprogrammed it when I felt like playing. :)
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I remember playing the line graphic version of the game on a stand up console in the arcade. It was one of my favorite games. The version I remember was a line graphic one, with the craggy outline of a landscape, and different size "flat spots" you could land on. The smaller ones gave you more points. The game was replaced, probably by Donkey Kong or Pac Man and I remember being pissed off at the time that I could no longer play it (this was Pre-Atari 2600).
/really/ PC compatible. We also had one Silicon Graphics IRIS machine. It was the hot rod of the bunch, but single user, so you had to wait your turn.
In college, I took an advanced CAD course where we wrote CAD software. There was a hodge-podge of machines there, from a Dec PDP-11 to a Harris 800. Lots of DEC Rainbow machines with the dust covers on them because they used the 80186 chip which wasn't
Anyway, we finally got an open ended assignment on the SGI machine, so I decided to write the Lunar Lander game on it - with the original as my design reference. I did a pretty good job of it too - as a mechanical engineer, I was able to use Newton's laws to accurately reflect the behavior of the LM... it obeyed Newtonian mechanics (no - it didn't take into account the weight of the fuel burned but neither did the original to my understanding).
I got all done and most of the people who looked at the rendition had not ever seen the original game. So they complained that I hadn't taken advantage of the 3d graphics the SGI machine had. It was like drawing a picture in Kindergarten and having the teacher tell me my grass was the wrong color. Only one other guy understood what I'd done - copied a real live arcade game from scratch. When they asked him what he thought, he just kept playing it and said "Awesome!"
The other funny thing was that at the end, nobody went back to look at the modeled objects... they all went back to play the game.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Well, I wrote also a lunar lander. Here is a page with screenshots:
http://seed7.sourceforge.net/scrshots/lander.htm
Greetings Thomas Mertes
Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net/
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.
xlander!
http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/a/xlander.htm
http://dir.filewatcher.com/d/Other/src/X11/Games/Video/xlander-1.2-9.src.rpm.36722.html
http://dir.filewatcher.com/d/Debian/hurd-i386/games/xlander_19920427-4_hurd-i386.deb.17470.html
must... play... now...
Here is the other lander - http://russianspaceweb.com/lk.html - which was supposed to carry men on the Moon.
Doesn't everyone succumb to the lure of the Lander? Our entry in the BADGE killer demo contest was a version of Lunar Lander that ran on the Amiga Workbench... with the terrain being whatever windows you happen to have open at the time...
I can't find a screen shot or even a copy of the program on google now, and while I have a box of Amiga floppy disks at home I doubt I could find anything that would read them now. I know it was on Fred Fish's disk collection, if someone has a copy I can load into UAE I'd appreciate it.
When I was a freshmen in the dorms, 1981, one of the guys there wrote his own version that featured an actual lunar lander module. It was attached with nylon line and pulleys to a stepper motor so that it would descend from the ceiling at the appropriate rate.
At the time most of us were impressed because very few people at the time, especially students, had micro computers much less the ability to interface them to the real world.
America... FUCK YEAH!!!!
First of all, you forgot to include a link to one of these all important pictures
And secondly, there's still one of the original lunar landers existing today, and is still actually flying intact. Snoopy was the LEM used on the Apollo 10 mission, and one of two that flew to the moon, but didn't land. Snoopy was flown down to within about 7.4 miles of the lunar surface, but was not equipped for actual landing. It was then flown back up to rendezvous with the command module, and then Snoopy was released into a heliocentric orbit where it still is today. The other LEM that went to the moon but didn't land was Aquarius, the LEM from Apollo 13, which served as a space lifeboat to get the crew back home to earth.
I think I'll go have me a hamburger and a Coke for lunch now, thank you!
Heh, I'm smarter than I thought, or stupider. I kept a copy and it's sitting on my own colo server, been sitting there forgotten since about 1995.
I said off!
Ah, to reminisce. I loved this article. It took me back to my high school days. I played âLanderâ(TM) many times at Villa Park HS in OC when we just had a 300 baud Teletype terminal in 10th grade (1972). The minicomputer was a HP3000 at Santa Ana College (now Rancho Santiago College). I remember printing out the code so I could learn how the formula for acceleration due to gravity worked. Next year in Physics, we officially learned the formulas for acceleration and I wrote my own version of Lander in BASIC. I remember buying the book mentioned in the article (101 BASIC Computer Games) just to compare my code with the bookâ(TM)s. I wouldnâ(TM)t be surprised if I still have that book in a box somewhere. Back in those days, computer time was precious and so I played Lander on paper before I bought my own first computer, a TRS-80 Model I in August 1977.
There was a story last week about somebody driving off the edge of the Grand Canyon and landing 600ft. below. We were in a meeting and someone asked âI wonder how fast they were going when they hit?â Because of Lander, I was able to do the calculation in my head very quickly (surprised myself) and came up with 134mph. Hope that was right!
I would like to take this moment to remind everyone how fucking cool humanity is for landing a man on the moon.
And if we want to give credit where credit's due - let's remember how fucking cool NASA were.
I'm surprised nobody has linked to it yet, but there's this guy who made a physical Lunar Lander arcade game. No flashy vector graphics here! You control an actual model of a lander using real gauges and everything.
Lunar Lander
Ok, so this is pretty cool because in the section where they are interviewing Jack Burness about the GT-40 version, he mentions me!
>>> Years later, a co-worker told Burness that the reason he got into programming was because he had played Moonlander as a teenager.
I had helped to video tape a symposium on stereochemistry at Wesleyan University, and the room that we put the video equipment away happened to have a GT-40 vector graphics system in it. Some students were playing Moonlander and I got to try a few times. It was so cool that I started sneaking into Wesleyan and stealing time on their PDP-10 computer system. I taught myself BASIC, then FORTRAN, and finally assembly language. Years later I worked at a startup and worked with Jack Burness programming a graphics coprocessor. "Help" included the time I accidentally wiped out the source to all the code he had been writing for months. Luckily he had it all inside Emacs and was able to write it back out to the disk! I almost tubed the company that day! Yikes!
My recollection is that Jack told me he wrote the entire Moonlander program over a weekend for our then-boss ex-DEC executive Lorin Gale. I was also told that Moonlander was used in a case against Nolan Bushnell, where he tried to patent the idea of video games (he invented "Pong"). The options were to wheel a (huge) PDP-1 into court to demonstrate Space War, or a little (portable) GT-40 running Moonlander. The GT-40 had the nice property that since it used core memory, you could load the program and start it up, unplug the computer from the wall, transport it elsewhere (like, to a courtroom) and plug it in and have it pick up from where it left off. I don't have first hand knowledge of this, but this is what I was told (possibly by Jack?).
Anyway, cool program and Jack is a really cool guy and great programmer!
Paul Cantrell
My family moved from Philadelphia, PA, to Concord, CA, in 1976. I was only five and my younger brother was only four. My mom and step-dad weren't looking forward to two little kids, bored out of their minds on a long car trip (and even longer waits in gas lines). So my older brother, who had just gotten a brand new HP calculator for his birthday, wrote a lunar lander game on it that we could take turns playing in the back seat. When I try to explain to my kids about playing "computer" games on a calculator (and being grateful!), they barely look up from their DSs to mumble "That sounds lame."
Damn kids. At least they don't play their games on my lawn.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I'm not sure exactly when it got written, but I know that the lunar lander program written for the CDC Cyber 6600 console was at least contemporaneous with the 2D lunar lander referenced in the article -- and the Cyber version was 3D. It was really hard to land that LEM without running out of fuel.
Seastead this.
How could you talk about 3D gravity games and don't mention cave9?
factor 966971: 966971
Thank you for the link! Yes, I've played with Cave9 and liked it, though it was relatively new and basic at the time. I helped them track down a minor bug in an early version because I thought it was a cool project. I had forgotten about it for a while ago and really ought to take another look.
I've been thinking I should either do another blog post or possibly just start a wiki page indexing 3D gravity games. For the relatively few of us who are fans I think it would be quite interesting / useful!