Lunar Landers
Apr. 27th, 2019 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinEvery port of Atari's 1979 arcade game Lunar Lander seems to map the controls differently, and it's an interesting exercise in translation.
Lunar Trails Art Project: http://moonlander.seb.ly/
IGN: https://my.ign.com/atari/lunar-lander
It's also on Atari Flashback Classics, volume 1.
(The Atari 2600Space War Star Ship cartridge also had a mode called Lunar Lander, but it's a completely different game, not much of a game really; it actually predates the arcade game.)
It's interesting to think that Lunar Lander was developed concurrently with Asteroids (many of which ended up shipping in surplus Lunar Lander cabinets, because Asteroids was way more popular). It feels like a throwback to the pre-Space Invaders era of the early 70s, when a coin-op arcade game could be something other than frenetic action. It's just a quiet, tense battle between you and physics, and physics is definitely trying hard to kill you. The inspiration was old text-based mainframe "Lunar Lander" simulations that were, obviously, themselves inspired by current events. You're trying to land on the Moon, and you've got to fire your rocket in such a way that you don't either come down too hard or run out of fuel and end up as a smear on the landscape. Usually they would only simulate vertical motion.
Atari's was two-dimensional, for an added degree of challenge--it was a hard game, though still nothing compared to what real Apollo astronauts had to deal with. Your LM started out traveling horizontally over a craggy landscape with just a few good, flat places to land, some of them labeled with score multipliers; you'd be gradually accelerated downward by gravity, and there was also a tiny, fictitious friction force operating as a bit of mercy toward the player (at least in the easiest difficulty mode). Instead of some number of lives, you had a finite fuel reserve. When you either crashed or landed successfully, you'd get a text message and some number of points based on your performance; either way, if you had any unburned fuel, the scenario would just start over with the remaining fuel and a new landscape. When you hit the ground with no fuel, the game was over.
The controls were somewhat eccentric:
www.arcade-museum.com/images/118/118124212764.jpg
There were left and right rotate buttons like Asteroids, but instead of a button, the rocket-engine throttle control was this gigantic analog lever that offered variable engine thrust. I think it was bigger than the one in the real Apollo Lunar Module. And then there was an "abort" button that you could push if you were in deep trouble, that would immediately right the LM's orientation and push out a huge rocket blast to send you up into the sky (also spending a lot of fuel).
So how do you map these to a keyboard, or a game controller? The Lunar Trails project, which I think is a new reimplementation (albeit one that looks a lot like the original), just maps rotate left, rotate right and thrust to the left/right/up cursor keys, and I think it leaves off the abort button entirely (or at least I can't find it). It's actually possible to land nevertheless. I don't think it simulates the different difficulty levels.
The IGN implementation, which I think is an actual emulation, maps rotate just like the Lunar Trails version, but up and down now increase and decrease the rocket thrust, to give you fine control. The space bar is the abort.
What drove me to write this is that I initially thought the Atari Flashback Classics version was broken: I couldn't figure out how to control the lander. Turns out they mapped left, right and up on the D-pad or joystick, which would be left/right/thrust in an Asteroids-type game, to rotate left, rotate right and abort. (Update: I'd misremembered; it's the A button that is mapped to abort.) The throttle is the right trigger, which makes some sense because on the XBox One controller this is a one-dimensional analog control. You can vary the thrust by squeezing the trigger to varying degrees. It's probably not as fine control as that big old handle, though.
Eventually Atari elaborated the basic concept into Gravitar, which is the same basic idea of "spaceship in ruthless gravity field" only even harder and you're also fighting enemies. I suppose you could call it Lunar Lander crossed with Spacewar. Gravitar reverted the engine control to a simple thrust button.
https://my.ign.com/atari/gravitar
It is astoundingly difficult. Gravitar was, I think, not that popular.
Lunar Trails Art Project: http://moonlander.seb.ly/
IGN: https://my.ign.com/atari/lunar-lander
It's also on Atari Flashback Classics, volume 1.
(The Atari 2600
It's interesting to think that Lunar Lander was developed concurrently with Asteroids (many of which ended up shipping in surplus Lunar Lander cabinets, because Asteroids was way more popular). It feels like a throwback to the pre-Space Invaders era of the early 70s, when a coin-op arcade game could be something other than frenetic action. It's just a quiet, tense battle between you and physics, and physics is definitely trying hard to kill you. The inspiration was old text-based mainframe "Lunar Lander" simulations that were, obviously, themselves inspired by current events. You're trying to land on the Moon, and you've got to fire your rocket in such a way that you don't either come down too hard or run out of fuel and end up as a smear on the landscape. Usually they would only simulate vertical motion.
Atari's was two-dimensional, for an added degree of challenge--it was a hard game, though still nothing compared to what real Apollo astronauts had to deal with. Your LM started out traveling horizontally over a craggy landscape with just a few good, flat places to land, some of them labeled with score multipliers; you'd be gradually accelerated downward by gravity, and there was also a tiny, fictitious friction force operating as a bit of mercy toward the player (at least in the easiest difficulty mode). Instead of some number of lives, you had a finite fuel reserve. When you either crashed or landed successfully, you'd get a text message and some number of points based on your performance; either way, if you had any unburned fuel, the scenario would just start over with the remaining fuel and a new landscape. When you hit the ground with no fuel, the game was over.
The controls were somewhat eccentric:
www.arcade-museum.com/images/118/118124212764.jpg
There were left and right rotate buttons like Asteroids, but instead of a button, the rocket-engine throttle control was this gigantic analog lever that offered variable engine thrust. I think it was bigger than the one in the real Apollo Lunar Module. And then there was an "abort" button that you could push if you were in deep trouble, that would immediately right the LM's orientation and push out a huge rocket blast to send you up into the sky (also spending a lot of fuel).
So how do you map these to a keyboard, or a game controller? The Lunar Trails project, which I think is a new reimplementation (albeit one that looks a lot like the original), just maps rotate left, rotate right and thrust to the left/right/up cursor keys, and I think it leaves off the abort button entirely (or at least I can't find it). It's actually possible to land nevertheless. I don't think it simulates the different difficulty levels.
The IGN implementation, which I think is an actual emulation, maps rotate just like the Lunar Trails version, but up and down now increase and decrease the rocket thrust, to give you fine control. The space bar is the abort.
What drove me to write this is that I initially thought the Atari Flashback Classics version was broken: I couldn't figure out how to control the lander. Turns out they mapped left, right and up on the D-pad or joystick, which would be left/right/thrust in an Asteroids-type game, to rotate left, rotate right and abort. (Update: I'd misremembered; it's the A button that is mapped to abort.) The throttle is the right trigger, which makes some sense because on the XBox One controller this is a one-dimensional analog control. You can vary the thrust by squeezing the trigger to varying degrees. It's probably not as fine control as that big old handle, though.
Eventually Atari elaborated the basic concept into Gravitar, which is the same basic idea of "spaceship in ruthless gravity field" only even harder and you're also fighting enemies. I suppose you could call it Lunar Lander crossed with Spacewar. Gravitar reverted the engine control to a simple thrust button.
https://my.ign.com/atari/gravitar
It is astoundingly difficult. Gravitar was, I think, not that popular.