Filed under: Time-Wasters, Retrocomputing
World's Oldest Time-Waster? Lunar Lander
by Grant Robertson Jul 20th 2009 at 4:00PM
It won't win any 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 existence. High-school student Jim Storer, obsessed with the Apollo missions -- and obviously inspired by what he'd witnessed along with the rest of the world, 40 years ago today -- took his inspiration to class in the fall of 1969. The result was a very simple text-based game for his school's Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-8. "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, can lay claim to the first primitive game but, what about the graphical Lunar Lander we've all known and loved on one platform or another? DEC consultant Jack Burness developed the first known graphical Lunar Lander as a demo project for the DEC GT40 console in 1973. It certainly wasn't the first video game, but it definitely holds its place in video game history.
Feel like wasting a little time day-dreaming about the 40th aniversary of the Apollo moon landing? Flash versions of Lunar Lander are easy to find, but I especially love this one -- which is incredibly true to the Atari arcade version I remember as a kid wandering the halls at the Cumberland Science Museum.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
aaron said 1:24PM on 7-21-2009
Wow, I played a LOT of Lunar Lander on the Apple IIe!
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scheckley said 5:37AM on 7-24-2009
I played this on an Acorn Electron back in the early 80's. halcyon days.
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Fabkins said 7:11AM on 8-05-2009
lol.... I remember playing lunar lander in the Arcade. It had a MASSIVE throttle which was analogue. Hard as hell. Great fun.
One of the first game programs I worth was a lunar lander inspired by that very game. Wrote it on the BBC Micro in high res mode (mode 0).
Great , great timewaster.
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