Printout of a DEC newsletter where someone fails spectacularly.
Release Date: Spring [Fall in North Hemisphere], 1969
Platform: PDP-8
Genre: Space Flight Simulation
Developer(s): James A. Storer
Publisher(s): DECUS
Time for another legendary game. As it turns out, this'll be the only game I'm covering for 1969. Skipping over Eight (Men) and Take-A-Way as I found no way to access them from my research. The former of those gets ported to the Sol-20 microcomputer, so we'll at least get to see it then... in 1981. Not gonna be for a looooong time. Whereas the latter two, Spacewar and Space Travel, are off for different reasons. Spacewar is a PLATO port of the 1962 classic, meaning it's a multiplayer-only game, and Space Travel, while its source code is available, hasn't been made into a easily playable package anywhere, so it's out.
[Add. Information about Space Travel is incorrect. There is in fact a browser-based conversion of Space Travel available. I'm still not going to cover it, as I consider it to be in the "non-game" category.]
This game and Hamurabi also prompted to me to add in all their various ports into my master spreadsheet, which will help clean up the release info in my articles. The release history of these early computer games is a tangled mess of ports, revisions and renaming that's hard to keep up with, especially when info on each version is scarce.
I digress, here we have Lunar, or as it's more commonly known today, Lunar Lander. This is the father of the whole subset of games bearing that name, which focus on landing a lunar space module on the moon. The original was designed by Jim Storer as a teenager on the PDP-8 minicomputer at Lexington High School - the same school that Civil War and a number of other games originated from. It's quite interesting that several of the extant early computer games originate from this one school. Storer himself would produce one more game - Pollution Game - in 1973, a variation on Hamurabi. He's also set up an online archive featuring many documents and other items relating to both games. From here is where I was able to more precisely identify the date of Lunar's creation. Storer explains that he wrote the game "in Fall 1969..." [that's Spring for us in the Southern Hemisphere] "...in recognition of the July 1969 Apollo moon landing."
Storer submitted the game to the DECUS program catalogue in early 1970, under the name Apollo. This game's got so many names it's hard to keep up with; it's referred to as Lunar, Lunar Landing Game, Rocket and Apollo. From there, it seems that it spread like wildfire, with many different versions and modifications being made to the game; some of which we'll see later on, such as Rocket and LEM. David Ahl got a hold of several versions of Lunar, converting them into BASIC for publication in 101 BASIC Computer Games, where he describes Lunar as "by far and away the single most popular computer game" in all editions. In the original edition, he includes the game under the title Rocket, along with two other versions labelled Rockt1 [Rocket] and Rockt2 [LEM], written by Eric Peters and William Labaree II respectively. Those are far more complex games that will get their own articles. I briefly looked at them and my brain just about melted. Technical stuff.
Lunar's influence goes much further than just the computer gaming scene as well. Probably the most famous of all the versions is Atari's 1979 arcade version, Lunar Lander. This one is not text-based, with a vector graphics display and with you controlling the Lunar Module in real time. Only God knows how many clones and variants of this one exist out in the world today. Often "Lunar Lander" is prescribed as a genre or subgenre of video games in general. I'm not sure if I'd subscribe to that notion, seeing as it's a very specific corner of Space Flight Simulation games; though we do have Roguelikes, so naming a genre after a game is not unprecedented.
Anyway, that's more digressing (I appear to be doing that a lot in this post). Back to Lunar. The core premise of the game is rather simple - land a lunar space module on the surface of the moon. There's only one decision for the player to make, which is how much fuel you spend and when you use it. It sounds simple in theory, but it's much trickier to land the module in practice.
Before I get into my experience with the game, I just want to briefly note that this is another game that I've played before. As with Hamurabi, it was the Apple I version from my MAME explorations a year or two ago. If my memory serves me right, I recall getting a perfect landing. Hopefully I can do it again. The version of the game I'm playing is a browser-based simulator of Storer's original code, written by Stefan Trenkel in 2019. I found this through Storer's archive also.
The opening paragraph within the game explaining the scenario is not as clear as it could be. It explains all the facts and figures regarding the current state of the lunar module, but I question how much of it is necessary and how it's presented. For instance, it provides the weight of the capsule as 32,500 lbs. This doesn't make any material difference as far as playing the game; it's simply irrelevant. The important numbers to know are how much fuel you start with [16,000 lbs.], and the amount of time you have before impact [120 seconds]. The game also blocks your fuel use into 10 second increments, allowing you to either use no fuel or between 8 - 200 lbs. for each 10 second block. All this information is simply presented in the lone block of text; it isn't formatted at all, so processing it all is harder than it needs to be.
Below the paragraph is what's essentially a spreadsheet where gameplay actually takes place. This is formatted in a rather messy fashion as well. It's broken up into five rows, which are from left to right: time (in seconds), altitude (in miles and feet), velocity (mph), fuel (in lbs.), and fuel rate, where you input the amount of fuel you desire to expend. Altitude has two rows, one for miles and the other for feet. The table's titles don't have any spacing between characters, making it all feel rather cramped, and thus a little hard to read at first.
My first attempt. Most attempts end in similar disaster.
However, once I got past the dodgy formatting, the gameplay ended up being rather compelling. The overwhelming majority of initial attempts end in blasting a new crater into the moon's surface as I figure out how best to use my fuel reserves. After about 45 minutes of experimenting and failing, I managed to get a landing that wasn't totally awful - the game graded it as "poor." A working strategy for a good landing was forming:
No fuel until the 70 second mark
6x200
150
110
50
30
20
After 45 minutes, progress. Finally.
So, at least something was starting to work. Just needed to fiddle with it slightly to get that perfect landing. During my second session, after fiddling with the numbers for about 20 minutes, I found that upping 50 > 51 and adding 2x10 and a 9 at the end got me a "good landing (could be better)" rating. I assume that's the second best rating, so the perfect landing must be close...
And that's pretty much the game; it's almost one big puzzle of trial and error, incrementally adjusting the numbers to improve the landing until you get it just right. Usually I groan at extensive amounts of trial and error baked into a game's design, but in this instance it managed to draw me in. I was constantly thinking to myself "just one more go and I'll get it right." No other game's managed to do that to me thus far.
However, after another 30 minutes of experimenting, I couldn't get it right, despite my hopes. None of the adjustments I made got me closer to that perfect landing. So I decided to use a guide. Or, more specifically, I looked at a solution provided by Jim Storer on his website. A game like this isn't worth spending 2 more hours on, which I could easily do at this rate.
One of two solutions provided by Jim Storer.
It's... extremely specific. In order to get a perfect landing, you need to get both your altitude and velocity as close to zero as possible to ensure a landing where you're moving at under 1 MPH. The best I managed on my own was around 2 MPH. I at least figured out that the 70 second mark is the optimal time to start burning fuel. I could've spend at least another hour fiddling with the numbers to try get there myself, though I still probably wouldn't have come up with something like this. I think I managed to get the perfect landing on the Apple I version of the game by using some cheesy strategy where I just descended the fuel rate by like, 10 each time or something silly like that. I tried that sort of strategy here and it didn't work.
On to the scores. Sound and Story are N/A, as is standard.
Time Played: I'll round it up to 2 hours.
Difficulty: 7/10
It's actually very challenging to get a perfect landing; getting a good landing is still tricky, but manageable. It will still take a lot of trial and error to get even a good landing.
Game Design: 6
In essence, Lunar is an exercise in trial and error; you simply mess around with the numbers until you get it right. While the specificity required to achieve a perfect landing and progressing towards it is moderately satisfying - aided by the game's grading system egging you on to do better - there comes a point where it becomes excessively tedious. Finding a solution for a perfect landing becomes a process of incrementally changing one or perhaps two numbers per attempt over dozens - if not hundreds - of attempts. It does well in the sense that there are multiple possible solutions for the perfect landing, but once a solution is found, there's no reason to continue playing.
I don't care much for how the game presents it's information, either, I find it cramped and a little confusing. Civil War and Hamurabi have it beat in that regard. The comparison between Lunar and these two games is also interesting because you have games with multiple choices and gameplay mechanics to consider versus Lunar, which effectively has one. It's a matter of if the one choice Lunar gives is more robust and substantial than the several Civil War and Hamurabi give. I think it has more depth than Civil War's, as some of those choices made little material impact on the outcome of a battle (and in some instances there was nothing you could do to win); but Hamurabi's network of decisions are more well thought through and compelling, making for a more immersive experience than the "just-chuck-in-the-numbers-and-hope-they-work" gameplay of Lunar.
Controls: 10
Basically the same as Hamurabi; the only inputs are numbers, and they're simple and easy to input.
Visual: 3
Formatting sucks, it feels cramped and is difficult to process the game's information. The spreadsheet is interesting, as it presents far more information at one than probably every game combined up to this point. It can be overwhelming, but it also assists with immersion, as the whole screen is covered with information, all of which is relevant to the gameplay.
Functionality: 4
I'm knocking off a point for the poor formatting, but otherwise there's little to complain about.
Accessibility: 2
Despite it being very confusing at first to understand the game, thanks to the poor opening explanation, it does gain back some ground for being simple to play. It's a rather intimidating game on first look, too.
Fun Factor: 6
It managed to draw me in to a point; once I got stuck, the tedium of incrementally changing a number or two each attempt got frustrating, hence my going to a guide. There's also no urge to return to it, unlike with Hamurabi, which is the reason for giving Lunar a lower score here.
That gives Lunar an even score of 31/70 (44.28). That's a D-tier placement, and tied with Civil War. In instances like this, I use the Fun Factor score as the tie-breaker, so Lunar takes the higher spot. I think that's appropriate to my thoughts, as I'd play this again over Civil War. The lower tiers are starting to get some filling out, which is to be expected at such a formative time in gaming history; everyone's just experimenting and figuring things out at this stage, and so the games are still quite primitive. I don't expect that to change in the coming years of the early 70s, but there might be a few surprises, who knows?
[Add.] Upon completing the rescore project, Lunar's score has increased by one point, to 32/70 (45.71%).
Speaking of, this game brings us to the end of a decade - the second decade of video games, effectively. The 60s to me are much more of a properly formative period for video games than the 50s were. The 1950s was a time of experimentation in high-level laboratory and university settings, and the games that came out of it are in reality isolated, having no impact on other games. A little bit of the technological foundation was in place with the TX-o computer being the basis for the PDP-1, which Spacewar! was written on, but that's about it.
In comparison, the 1960s brought many differing developments that laid the real foundation for video games to thrive going into the 70s. Most notable of these are DEC's PDP line of computers, which eventually find their way into schools, leading to the first teenage programmers (of which there will be many through the 70s and 80s), and - and this is definitely the most important development - the invention of BASIC, the programming language that will define the microcomputer revolution of the mid-late 70s. Spacewar! also arrived in the 60s, the first game to receive wide distribution, and the earliest game to have perceivable influence on later games (Computer Space and Galaxy Game). DEC end up becoming a rather important company in terms of not just their computers, but also their user's society (DECUS), allowing people to submit their programs to their library so that others could try them. David Ahl also worked for them, and he becomes a very important formative figure in 70s computer gaming.
So now, with that, the 1970s are indeed upon me, and with that brings a massive increase in the number of games - 1970 has 22 at my most recent count, so we'll be there for a little while. 1970 is also the year where the Prehistory era of this blog will come to a conclusion, as I marked 1971 as the beginning of the video game industry proper. Progress is only going to accelerate further from there in terms of game design, genres (I'm particularly looking forward to the first RPGs), technology, and the introduction of the final stream of gaming: console gaming, both home console and handhelds. Exciting times ahead!
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