[benjedwards]

If anyone is curious, in 2009, I discovered that Jim Storer was the author of the first Lunar Lander game and interviewed him about it (and also chronicled the history of the game beyond that). He later provided the source code, which was awesome.

https://technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/index.html

My favorite part is this:

“After leaving high school I never thought about the game again,” says Storer. “Until about a couple of months ago when someone e-mailed me about this, I was completely unaware of any Lunar Lander game other than the one I wrote in high school.”

[GMoromisato]

I'm honored to be included in this article--I wrote Lander (1990) originally for Windows 2.x.

When I applied for a job to work on Lotus Notes (back in 1989), I showed the interviewer (Tim Halvorsen) my Lander game. He said, "That's pretty cool--let's try running it on Windows 3."

At first, I thought, cool! I get to see Windows 3 (which had not yet been released). But then he said, "Windows 3 runs everything in protected mode, so if you have any out-of-bounds pointer access, it will crash instantly. Let's see how you did."

I was on pins and needles the entire time.

But fortunately, Lander didn't crash, and Tim was happy. I ended up getting the job, which forever changed my career.

[shaunn]

I was a huge Anacreon fan back in the day, thank you for hours and hours of entertainment!

[GMoromisato]

I really appreciate that! I had a lot of fun working on it. Thank you!

[username135]

Thats awesome an story

[nox101]

That's awesome

I just wanted to add, there's also mechanical lander games that pre-date lunar lander

I can't find a picture. IIRC the machine was something like this

https://content.invisioncic.com/r322239/monthly_10_2015/post...

Except it had terrain and pits. A pit would light up and you needed to land in the pit (your ship landing would depress the button in the center of the pit). If you didn't aim well your ship would hit the edge of the pit, tilt, and you'd fail. If you did hit the button then the light would go off and a different pit would light up.

-- update --

now that I think about it, maybe the controls were more like UFO catcher where you'd align at the top and then press "land".

Anyway, it used to be at Disneyland at the Main Street Arcade.

[popctrl]

I played the game in this picture at the pinball museum in vegas. One lever operates the rear fan and the other operates the bottom fan. It was a lot of fun for an analog arcade game.

I returned to the museum a few years ago and it was no longer working. I hope they fix it one day.

[ab5tract]

Seems unlikely that a computer was involved in this.

[elwell]

Lunar Lander was one of the early games I tried to make a copy of as I was learning programming in high school: (Java applet!) https://github.com/celwell/space-landing

[acyou]

Wow, that is a great article. Incredible research and depth. Thanks for the contribution.

[tieze]

Well yea, two points:

a) thats awesome b) I am taking a wild leap in deducing you're the same retro-games Benj Edwards journalist that was part of the infamous Retronauts East team. Just wanted to say i always quite enjoyed your presence :)

[scrame]

dude,that's awesome!