One of the smash hits of the 1970s arcade was Atari’s Lunar Lander. A landing craft in orbit around a moon would descend slowly towards the surface, and through attitude and thrust controls the player had the aim of bringing it safely in to land. Many a quarter would have been poured into the slot by eager gamers wanting to demonstrate their suitability for astronaut service.
It was to this game that [Chris Fenton] turned when he was looking for inspiration for the 2016 NYCResistor Interactive show, and the result was a Lunar Lander game with a difference, one in which the gameplay was enacted through a physical lander and lunar surface. In this case the moon in question is a papier-mâché-covered inflatable ball, and the lander is a 3D-printed model on the end of a lead screw. Control is provided by an Arduino, with a rough facsimile of the original control panel and a set of microswitches on the model to detect a crash or a safe landing.
The result is a surprisingly playable game, as can be seen from the video below the break.
We’ve brought you more than one Lunar Lander game over the years. There was this plot of all the game trajectories taken on an individual cabinet, and of more relevance to this project, and another physical version of the game.
George Lucas would have been proud. My first Lunar Lander experience was at a teletype terminal accessing the Kiewit computer center at UNH. You would start the game, type in the amount of burn in seconds, get a altitude/velocity status and enter your next burn. It was fiendishly hard. Best part was the yellow paper roll you could tear off to memorialize your adventures. More fun than the dating program that never seemed to return any compatible matches.
I remember playing something similar on a teletype. If memory serves me right, it was indeed impossibly hard not to crash.
Same here. Played it at Sac State. Damn I’m old…….
I found an old BASIC version and adapted it to whatever BASIC I had for a Xerox 820-II. Also ported it to TI BASIC.
Wasn’t too difficult, just making some changes for command formatting and syntax differences. After getting them working I bloated up the code inserting a lot of funny reports for failure based on impact speed.
Good old LEM*** on DTSS!
http://moonlander.seb.ly Still fun!
I got 1 perfect landing, and nearly infinite poor outcomes.
Turns out you can get to 19,435 feet on one tank of gas.
Mileage may vary
Didn’t expect that to work on my phone, or to be as fun!
Out of fuel! Thanks. :D
Thanks!
Thank you for the tip, machsv! Playing like crazy now
don’t forget to look at http://moonlander.seb.ly/viewer/ and watch everyone playing
[IMG]http://i68.tinypic.com/2qiz0ci.jpg[/IMG]
Holy shit, got it my first try. Then closed the tab so I can tell myself it was skill, not luck.
Great link-Thanks :)
There was also Jupiter Lander on Vic-20 which I played many times. Didn’t like it as a youngster, but found I enjoyed it years later.
landing on Jupiter seems kinda odd, since it’s considered not to have a surface ..
Oh hell yeah, playing with the four function keys. It wasn’t as much fun as Gorf or Radar Rat Race, but one of my favorites.
You can see an old version of my LED installation in the background :) newer version is much nicer
this needs to be built big enough to ride in
NASA did that back in the day, and not just for the Moon. The “flying bedstead” was an earthside trainer for the Lunar lander. https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_316.html
Right. And they did something very, very similar to the lander featured here: https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/nasas-moon-simulator/
BTW, the flying beadstead almost killed Mr. Armstrong. I watched the video and I still can’t understand how a human being could react that fast to eject just in the right split-second. Skills honed by war, I suppose.
” surprisingly playable”
To me it looked completely unplayable… What is the scale of the lander to the moon exactly?
Atari’s Lunar Lander was actually something of a dud. It came out just before Asteroids and demand for Asteroids was so great that LL cabs were turned into Asteroids.
This isn’t the first time somebody turned LL into a physical simulation. http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2009-10/you-built-what-real-life-replica-videogame-lunar-lander