Lunar Lander

The player can rotate the module and burn fuel to fire a thruster, attempting to gently land on marked areas. The scenario resets after every successful landing or crash, with new terrain, until no fuel remains. Coins can be inserted at any time to buy more fuel. Development of the game began with the creation of a vector graphics engine by Atari after the release of the 1978 Cinematronics game Space Wars. Engine co-designer Wendi Allen (credited as Howard Delman) proposed using it to create a Lunar Lander game, a genre which dates to 1969. Allen and Rich Moore developed the game. It was Atari's first vector-based game and the first multiple-perspective video game, changing views to zoom in as the module approached the Moon. Lander sold 4,830 units, a moderate success, but was soon overtaken by the November 1979 Asteroids, and 300 Asteroids units were shipped in Lunar Lander-branded cabinets. One of the first two games to be registered with the United States Copyright Office, though the prior games in the genre kept the gameplay from being patented. Included in a 2012 art installation at the Dublin Science Gallery. Since 2000, it has been included in numerous compilation releases of Atari games.

• Title — Lunar Lander • Developer — Atari • Publisher — Atari • Designer — Wendi Allen Rich Moore • Platforms — Arcade • Released — August 1979 • Genre — Space flight simulation Lunar Lander • Modes — Single-player • Arcade System — Atari 6502 Vector

Lunar Lander is a single-player game in the Lunar Lander subgenre in which the player attempts to land a lunar landing module on the Moon. The game is displayed using black and white vector graphics and depicts a side-on view of the terrain and the landing module. At the top of the screen, the player is given information on the module's speed, altitude, and fuel, along with the score and time spent in the game. The terrain is jagged and has only a few flat areas appropriate for landing. The player controls the orientation of the module and fires the thruster to steer the module safely to a landing area. The module is always displayed in the center of the screen, with the terrain scrolling beneath it as it travels horizontally, wrapping the single screen-width of terrain endlessly. When the lander gets close to the surface, the view changes to a close-up view of the lander. • Illustration — Screenshot of gameplay. The lander is tilted to the right, and two safe landing areas are highlighted. If the player successfully lands the module, they are awarded points based on how softly the module landed and the difficulty of the landing site and are awarded a small amount of fuel for good landings. The safe landing areas are highlighted with a flashing bonus multiplier, which is higher for smaller areas. If the module crashes—which happens if it is moving too fast, or rotated too far from vertical when it touches the ground, or landed on a not-flat area—then a small number of points is awarded. The player has a limited amount of fuel, which is consumed by controlling the module. Whether the player lands safely or crashes, the game starts another round with a different set of terrain and the player's remaining fuel. The game ends when the module crashes into the ground after running out of fuel. The game is controlled via two buttons that rotate the module left and right, a large handle that fires the thruster (proportionally to how hard it is pulled), and an "abort" button that rotates the module back to vertical and fires the thruster, burning a large amount of fuel in an attempt to stop the module from crashing. Each action uses fuel, and when the fuel runs out the module no longer responds to the controls. The game features four levels of difficulty which adjust the landing areas and module controls. The highest difficulty causes the module to continue rotating after it is turned until the player counters the rotation, instead of only rotating while the button is pressed. The player can adjust the game's difficulty at any time during play. Unlike other arcade games, Lunar Lander does not feature a time limit; instead, the game starts with a set amount of fuel and inserting additional coins purchases more fuel, allowing indefinite gameplay. The amount of fuel gained per coin, including the initial game-starting coin, is adjustable by the operator to set levels ranging from 450 units to 900 units.

• Illustration — DEC GT40 graphics terminal running Moonlander The Lunar Lander concept was initially created in 1969 as a text-based game called Lunar, or alternately the Lunar Landing Game. Many further versions of the game were developed over the course of the next decade; by 1979 the style of game was collectively seen as its own subgenre. The first graphical version of the subgenre, Moonlander, was released in 1973 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which commissioned a real-time, graphical Lunar Lander game to demonstrate the capabilities of its new DEC GT40 graphics terminals. After the release of the 1977 Cinematronics vector graphics game Space Wars, Atari began work on their own vector graphics engine, in which the graphics are constructed by drawn lines instead of pixels like in the more standard raster graphics engines. The initial hardware design work was done by Cyan Engineering, Atari's research and development subsidiary. Once it built an initial hardware concept, the project was passed on to Atari employee Wendi Allen, (née Howard Delman) who enhanced the prototype engine into one that could be used by game designers. Once it was done, she proposed using the monochrome game engine for a Lunar Lander game. Allen had previously played Moonlander during a tour of NASA and had played one of the text-based Lunar Lander games in college. In Fall 1978 development of the game began, with Allen in charge of the hardware and Rich Moore, who had only been with Atari for a few months and who had also played a Lunar Lander game in college, focusing on the programming. Atari had also produced Star Ship for the Atari VCS in 1977, which contains a version of Lunar Lander, but the gameplay of that title was not used for the arcade game. Development began with Moore drawing out the game's graphics on graph paper, after which the pair wrote out the game's code on paper for typists to transcribe. Allen and Moore worked closely together, bouncing ideas off each other as Moore proposed programming designs and Allen iterated the hardware design. One point of contention in the development process was the difficulty of the game; Allen initially wanted the module to move as realistically as possible, but they determined that the result was almost impossible to play. As Allen noted in an interview in 2010, "even the real lunar landers had computer assist!" Eventually, they settled on including four difficulty levels, as compared to Moonlanders three, though Allen has referred to the hardest level as "one of the most painful difficulty spikes in gaming". Allen chose the large handle used to control the thruster: Atari initially planned to use a standard joystick, but she wanted a control with more physicality, including adding a rubber pad at the bottom to give players the impression that they could pull harder for a little more thrust. The thrust control has ten levels of thrust, as compared to the single on or off level of thrust in previous Lunar Landers, though Moore has noted that this gives players more incorrect options to choose from. The game's font was designed by Ed Logg and used for several other Atari vector graphics games. Several planned ideas had to be cut from the game during development. Allen has stated that chief among these was retaining a crater where the player's previous spaceships had crashed; it was cut as the new hardware could not draw enough lines fast enough to handle the detail. She also wanted to add in a McDonald's location easter egg, as was present in Moonlander. Over a year after development started, Lunar Lander was released in August 1979, just after the tenth anniversary of the first human Moon landing, though Atari did not link this connection in its marketing of the game.

• Lunar Lander Beyond (2024, Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch)