Well, we're a little late given that the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing has passed, but this version of Lunar Lander is just too cool to pass up. Grant wrote about the classic versions of Lunar Lander last month, and though this one is certainly inspired by the same event, the implementation is just a tad different.

To play this 3D version of Lunar Lander you will need the Google Earth plug-in for your browser (don't worry, if you don't have it the page will automatically prompt you to install it). This version of Lunar Lander attempts to simulate the landing that Neil Armstrong performed on Apollo 11. The game is rendered in 3D using Google Earth's moon mapping capability, and your view is from outside the lunar landing module.

You can control the lander's tilt side-to-side and forward-and-back by using the arrow keys, and you use the spacebar to fire the ignite the lander's engine. The game starts with you moving rapidly to the left towards the landing site. You must slow the lander down and keep from impacting the ground until you reach the landing site, but be careful not to run out of fuel. To say this is difficult is an understatement, but thankfully there is an Unlimited Fuel cheat you can employ to make landing a bit easier.

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.

If, like me, you're totally obsessed with all of the coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing and walk on the moon, you're going to like Jason Kottke's latest project.

If you're not aware of the coverage I'm talking about, first of all check out We Choose The Moon, which is a project put together by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum to follow the Apollo 11 mission from lift-off to landing on the moon. The site contains CG graphics of the main (i.e. most interesting) stages of the trip, and there is full 24 hour a day coverage of the radio communications between mission control, the service and control module, and the lunar lander. Of course, to top it all off, you can follow mission control, the control module, and the lunar lander on Twitter.

I've been following We Choose the Moon all week, and though it's amazing to have coverage of all of the radio communications, I'm spoiled. I want video. Luckily, NASA knew that video coverage of the moon landing was imperative, and the mission was put together with a priority of having video coverage available and broadcast live to the public. Jason Kottke has delved into YouTube and either found or uploaded copies of Walter Cronkite's CBS News broadcasts of both the first ever moon landing, and the first ever moon walk, for a site he's put together called Apollo 11 Live TV Coverage. Kottke states that the site was inspired both by the anniversary of Apollo 11, and by the unfortunate recent passing of legendary news anchorman Walter Cronkite.

The site is set up with a late-60's era television framing YouTube, which Kottke hopes will help to emulate the experience people had 40 years ago of watching the live action on relatively small and low-resolution television screens. It's cleverly coded to show the video coverage at exactly the same times it was originally broadcast 40 years ago - this isn't typical web-based video where you can scrub backwards and forwards; this is appointment television viewing.