Arcade · Lunar Lander
Lunar Lander
Drop from 2,000 feet and set it down on the pad slower than 10 ft/s. Hold the engine too long and you run dry; wait too long and you can't stop.
How to play
- Hold Space or ↑, or hold the Thrust button, to fire the engine. Let go to fall.
- The moon pulls you down at 5 ft/s². The engine pushes up at 12 ft/s² and burns 5 units of fuel a second.
- Touch down at 10 ft/s or slower to land. 3 ft/s or slower is a perfect landing worth 25 extra points.
- Score: up to 50 for fuel left and up to 50 for a soft touchdown. Enter launches again.
Stats
| Flights | 0 |
|---|---|
| Landings | 0 |
| Perfect landings | 0 |
| Crashes | 0 |
| Best score | 0 |
History
In fall 1969, months after Apollo 11, high-school student Jim Storer wrote a lunar landing game on a PDP-8: each turn you chose a fuel burn and read back your altitude and speed.1 BASIC versions spread through David Ahl's game books,23 and in 1979 Atari turned the idea into its first vector-graphics arcade game, Lunar Lander.45 This one keeps the physics and scoring of my own text version and draws it like a 2600 cartridge. See the timeline →
Sources
- 1Jim Storer, “Jim Storer - Lunar Landing Game Related Documents,” Jim Storer, Brandeis University, n.d., https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/LunarLander/LunarLander.html (accessed October 26, 2026).
- 2David H. Ahl, ed., 101 BASIC Computer Games (Maynard, MA: Digital Equipment Corporation, 1973). Cited at page 182.
- 3David H. Ahl, ed., BASIC Computer Games: Microcomputer Edition (Morristown, NJ: Creative Computing; trade edition New York: Workman Publishing, 1978). Cited at page 106.
- 4Howard Delman, interviewed by Scott Stilphen, “DP Interviews... Howard Delman,” Digital Press, n.d., http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_howard_delman.html (accessed October 26, 2026).
- 5Atari, Inc., Lunar Lander (sales flyer) (Sunnyvale, CA: Atari, Inc., 1979), https://archive.org/details/arcadeflyer_lunar-lander (accessed October 26, 2026).
About this version
I first wrote this as a text game, with the lander drawn in ASCII characters. This version keeps its physics and scoring and draws it like an Atari 2600 cartridge. One fix: the original burned fuel four times faster, which left only 5 seconds of thrust. That isn't enough to stop a fall from 2,000 feet, so no landing was possible.