The finale has arrived! It's time to close out the Prehistory series with this - the 25th and final article. As a side, I love that it closes on a nice, round number. It certainly was not planned that way. It's taken just under 11 months to complete this series, which is longer than I initially expected. However, the further I researched, the more my list of games kept expanding. There were also some lengthy down periods where I didn't post anything. I hope in the coming year to become more consistent with game articles, and to also produce some other types of articles that you'll have to wait in suspense for.
I also didn't plan to end the series with two Lunar Lander games. I often don't research whether games are available to me until I begin to work on that game's article. That's going to change in the coming year, as I want to be more prepared in my research and planning.
Rocket is the second of these two Lunar Lander games, and final of the three Lunar Lander variants listed in David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games book. The first was the original game by Jim Storer, and the second is LEM, by William Labaree, which I covered in the previous article. In the last article, I described that LEM and Rocket take two different approaches to expanding on Storer's original. LEM added additional gameplay mechanics, whilst Rocket (listed as Rockt1 in the original BASIC Games) adds graphical elements, but plays much more similarly to the original game.
The Lunar Lander page from the original 101 BASIC Computer Games.
Rocket was developed by Eric Peters, an employee at DEC - the company that published the majority of BASIC games through publishing the original version of David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games. Peters wrote another game published in the book, Even Wins. He developed a "cybernetic" version of the game that features AI that learns to play the game as you go. Finding any more information on Peters is quite difficult, as there are numerous people who share that name.
It's safe to say I was significantly less intimidated by Rocket in comparison to LEM. On the surface it seemed far more similar to the original in terms of gameplay, and the inclusion of a graphical display of the location of the lunar module looked like it would provide an excellent visual reference. I ended up really disliking LEM, so I'm hopeful that Rocket will be far more enjoyable.
Nice, clear instructions. Did you know your on-board computer in the game is named Digby?
First off, the game has very well-formatted instructions that clearly explain its mechanics. Rocket actually, in further contrast to LEM, simplifies the game mechanics from Lunar. You only have 150 units of fuel, the maximum you can use per second is 30, and each unit of fuel slows you down by 1 ft/sec. This immediately made sense to me, which I appreciated, having come from LEM where I stared at the instructions for a good 5 minutes, at least, trying to figure out everything.
I followed the same strategy I used for Lunar, which was waiting to use my fuel until being much closer to the surface. Immediately I noticed a formatting error when I inputted my first command, with the text shifting left a few spaces. I waited until I was under 350ft from the surface before putting the thrust on full blast. I got close, but this I crashed, hitting the surface a 8.3 ft/sec (9.1 kph, which seems awfully slow...)
You blew it. Literally.
I was actually pretty happy with this run, despite the failure. I decided to wait for another second for my follow up attempt. This one went better, landing at 3.16 ft/sec (3.46 kph). The game still considered this a crash, which mildly annoyed me. Going that slow would surely not cause a destructive crash?
Round 2 also came to an explosive ending.
Oh well, another round! This one went less well, so I tried again. Another failure, as I forgot what I did from my most successful run.
However, on the next attempt, I found success. In fact, I got a perfect landing. It turns out I wasn't too far off on my second attempt. The winning strategy was as follows:
Wait until the module is 250 feet from the surface.
Use 30 units of fuel for the next 3 seconds.
Use 10 units of fuel for 5 seconds.
Win.
The winning formula.
Surprisingly simple. I think it helped that I had previous experience from other Lunar Lander-style games, though. I'm at the very least pleased that I figured out the perfect landing on my own in one of these games. On to the scores.
Time Played: 0:12
Difficulty: 4/10 (Easy)
It wasn't challenging to figure out the perfect landing. I'm giving a bit of leeway in this score, as my previous experience helped, so it may be harder for someone coming into the game fresh. It's still the easiest of the three Lunar Lander games by quite some margin.
Gameplay: 7/20
Being based on Lunar means that Rocket has a solid gameplay foundation. It works like a puzzle, consisting of experimenting with the use of fuel and timing of using it through trial and error. The refining process is much simpler than Lunar, as the numbers you work with are much smaller here. While it makes for a good introduction to the Lunar Lander genre, the simplifying of the gameplay has caused some depth and difficulty to be lost, which I believe is to the game's detriment.
You may be confused as to why this is getting a 7, when the original Lunar got a 6. I'm currently doing a rescore of all reviewed games, and will post an article detailing these changes. Rocket's score is based on these changes, and will make more sense once I release that article.
Control: 5/10
As standard as it gets for text-based games.
Visual: 5/10
Unfortunately, the visual plot of the module's distance from the landing zone isn't anywhere near as helpful as I thought it would be. It only follows the module's distance up to halfway, so it ends up being rather pointless. There is also that slight formatting error, where the numbers on the table shift left after inputting a command. On the positive side, the instructions are very well presented, and general formatting is sound. I think all of this evens out to result in a 5 being a fair score.
Functionality: 5/5
Didn't find any technical issues.
Accessibility: 3/5
Easily the most accessible of the three Lunar Lander games. It's much friendlier, and simpler to understand due to how "game-ified" it is.
Fun Factor: 6/20
I was a bit disappointed by how simple the game was. I think Rocket suffers from my previous experience with Lunar. I did most of my obsessive trial and error experimenting there, so I came into Rocket already knowing how it would work. It being simplified really works against it there, whereas I think it wouldn't as much if I was coming into Rocket without having played any previous Lunar Lander games.
Rocket's final score is quite amusing. At the time of writing, it's identical to Lunar's - 31/70 (44.28%) - a D-tier placement. It won't be like that for much longer, though. I do think that Rocket is marginally worse than Jim Storer's original game. I was hoping for it to be better, but the distance plot ends up being pointless, and the gameplay is simplified just a touch too much.
Next time we move into the beginnings of the commercial era of video games. I've already done the first two arcade games, Computer Space and Galaxy Game, so my attention has to turn elsewhere. Computer gaming was still evolving, and the next game up is a landmark game that would continue to be remade and expanded upon all throughout the 1970s: Mike Mayfield's Star Trek.
However, before that, I want to rescore all the games from the Prehistory series, as I've mentioned already. That'll be the next article to expect before I get into Star Trek.
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The next two games up - and the final two of 1970 and the Prehistory series - are both Lunar Lander variants. They both expand on Jim Storer's iconic 1969 classic in different ways. One adds extra levels of complexity, and the other adds graphical elements.
LEM (short for "Lunar Excursion Module") is the former of these two. In the original version of Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games book, this game is listed as Rockt2, to not-so-creatively distinguish it from the other two versions of Lunar Lander in the book. The name LEM comes from the 1978 microcomputer edition of the book. The in-game title is Lunar Landing Simulation.
Our author is another one who's a bit of a mystery. William P. Labaree II is the credited author, and he was from Alexandria, Virginia. All I can surmise from that is that he probably wasn't a high school student, as game authors who were high school students were typically credited alongside the high school they attended - but that's about it. This is the only game he's credited with according to MobyGames, and I couldn't find any more information about him online.
I have to be honest - this game kind of scares me. Just looking at the sample runs from the book gives me great concern that this is quite a complex take on the Lunar Lander format. The book describes it as "the most comprehensive of the three versions," and goes into detail of all the options you have in the game. You can set the interval of thrust firing, the thrust itself, the angle of the module and the measurement system (metric or imperial.) The more I think about it, the more it sounds like the text version of Atari's 1979 vector graphic arcade version of Lunar Lander.
My fear of LEM only builds upon opening the game and reading the instructions. And boy, there are a lot of instructions for this game. It first asks if you've "flown a mission" before. Appreciate the wording there. It then gives you the option to choose metric or imperial (the game calls it "English") measurement. Obviously, I choose metric.
The game then launches into a lengthy explanation of its mechanics. These are unquestionably the longest instructions of any game I've played to date. Bear with me, as this'll take a bit to explain.
I have to manage horizontal positioning now? On top of vertical?
The first mechanic is altitude angle. Fortunately, the game provides a helpful diagram in understanding this mechanic. You can choose any angle between -180 and +180 degrees, with 180 degrees I assume meaning that the lunar module is upside down, and 0 meaning the opposite. Being at 180 degrees would never be desirable, in that case. The moon's orbit factors into the angle also, with the orbit moving westward.
Next is thrust. The game sets 1 fuel unit as equals to 1 second of maximum thrust. You have to manage the engine power as well, and can set that to a value between 10 and 100 percent.
The input order is time interval, percentage of thrust, altitude angle. Each are separated by a comma. To abort you would input 0,0,0.
The rest of the instructions. Oy vey.
Finally, the game explains the numbers presented on the gameplay table. I'll likely need to refer back to this to remember what's what. Boy, this is complicated stuff for 1970. You see why I feel intimidated by this game now? The learning curve appears more like a sheer cliff face. Yet, I must push on in the face of fear.
I'm going to take an approach similar to the original Lunar, where you let the module drop for the first few turns before slamming on the thrusters. I take the initial steps in 10-second intervals.
What do the numbers mean??
Eventually I got bored and upped in intervals to 20 seconds, then 30, then 60. I have absolutely no idea what's going on, what range the numbers should stay between, literally everything. I keep toying around with it, and get the module over to the landing site, but I overshoot it, and get a game over, having been "lost in space with no hope of recovery."
Awfully generous calling me an "experienced astronaut."
Great. That really didn't fill me with confidence. I have no idea what I was doing wrong, as I was trying to get the module to go back the other way, but nothing worked. I have to admit, I didn't really want to play this again. It's too complicated.
I pushed through and gave it another go. I felt like I got closer, but still got lost in space.
So bad it needed a sequel.
The third time, however, I at least managed to crash. I feel like I'm starting to figure out how the game works. I managed my vertical velocity fairly well, but my horizontal velocity finished at about half of where it started.
Everyone died, but at least I made progress.
A strategy was beginning to form in my mind at this point. I think that I need to think about working the module on diagonal angles (between say, -70 and -20 degrees) to get both vertical and horizontal velocity down efficiently.
Several attempts later, and I was consistently crashing, but not getting anything better than that. The horizontal velocity seems to decrease much slower than vertical velocity. Eventually I got a run that crashed at only 55kph - my best result yet.
This was the best I managed.
I had been playing for over an hour at this stage, and had pretty much had enough. I was already feeling quite tired on the day I played this, and my patience had run out for such a precision game. I had a break for a while, played some Stardew Valley to take my mind off things, cooked dinner, and then came back to do the YouTube recording. That was my best result to date, which was a crash and 12 kph that somehow made an 8m deep crater... that doesn't sound right. Did the author know how slow 12 kph is? I'm at least happy for the progress. Still not enjoying the game, but I'm improving at it.
If I ever bother to come back to this game to try for a good landing, I'll let you all know. I can't see that happening, I kind of just want to move on from this game. In that spirit, here's the scores:
Time Played: 1:15. Trying to simplify the time format. When you start each landing attempt takes about 15 minutes, which I got down to 8 - 10 for my later attempts.
Difficulty: 8/10 (Very Hard)
It's very hard to learn, and just as hard to get a good landing. I wasn't able to do it, but that's also a symptom of the game being very off putting and unfun to play. I didn't want to try for a good landing.
Gameplay: 4/10
I had a really hard time figuring out my score for gameplay, because the core gameplay is solid - it's based on Lunar, so it's mechanically sound. I think it just does too much. Too many mechanics, too many numbers on screen... The addition of horizontal movement, and complicating the engine controls I don't think has made the game better, only more frustrating. The original Lunar worked because it knew the limitations of the medium, and focused on one mechanic. It's also worth mentioning that LEM starts you at a much further distance from the moon, which makes each attempt drag on for what feels like forever, even if it's only 8 - 10 minutes.
Control: 5/10
Standard for text-based games. This reflects the score revisions I'm in the process of working through.
Visual: 4/10
While I appreciate the altitude angle graphic - it's one of the most detailed text graphics I've seen in this series - the main game feels very cluttered. It's like a spreadsheet that has text too big for the boxes, and as a result there is asymmetry everywhere, and is difficult to process. There's also way too many numbers. We don't need that many decimal points.
Functionality: 5/5
I didn't find any technical issues.
Accessibility: 1/5
Yeah, my initial impression tanks the accountability score. I'm sure it would be the same for a lot of people. It's complexity is very off putting, and it being a text game doesn't help matters. I feel like this was a game made for physics majors or maths geeks.
Fun Factor: 1/20
I just didn't enjoy this at all. It's too complex, doesn't explain what to do well enough, and is frustrating to learn. Once I figured some things out there was maybe a sliver of enjoyment to be had. I wanted to put my initial impression aside, but it does ring true.
So that gives LEM a score of 20 (28.57%), which earns it a low E-tier placement. It'll look a little better once the rescore happens, as this is much better than some of the junk that's currently above it in the tier list. LEM overall is really just unpleasant to play. Stick with Storer's original or Atari's arcade game. I'm a bit more hopeful for Rocket, as that seems closer to the original.
[Add.] Upon completing the rescore project, LEM gained 2 points up to 22/70 (31.42%)
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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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