*So, let’s wrap up 1979 and our first ten games with Lunar Lander, another arcade classic from Atari.
*You’ll be shocked to hear that this game was not initially dreamed up as a response to Space Invaders. It was in fact a follow-up to a game called Moonlander which had been created about five years earlier, though there was in fact a text based game called the Lunar Landing Game that had been created about ten years prior to this, so, even a couple of years before The Oregon Trail launched our journey in 1971. So, Lunar Lander is, unlike a lot of the games we’ve been seeing up to this point, not creating its own genre or its own conventions as much as its kind of coming into a template already set up.
*So, Howard Delman and Rich Moore are the two Atari employees who did the majority of the work on this game with Delman on the hardware and Moore on the software. Delman came up with the thing that really elevates this game and would make it a lot of fun playing on an arcade cabinet which is a big throttle lever. Atari originally intended to just have a standard joystick, but Delman pushed for the large throttle and I think that tactile element would be the thing that, for me at least, would elevate this above what it might otherwise be.
*But let me talk about what it is, I guess. The player controls a, well, a lunar module and you fly over a landscape with peaks and valleys and you use the controls to fire thrusters and rotate the module with the goal of landing softly and easily. More difficult spots to land have give you higher points. And you are on a limited amount of fuel, so, if you burn it up, you won’t have the thrusters to slow your descent, of course, and you will explode upon impact.
*Like Asteroids, the visuals here are vector graphics, not pixels. It’s a minimalist style, but I like it.
*There is a lot to like about this game.
*Boy, does that ever sound damning. Just very coolly and intellectually, “There is a lot to like about this game.” And I have to say that does kind of sum up my reaction to this game which is that, well, there are a lot of details that I like, but ultimately, it just really leaves me cold and I’ll talk about why in a second.
*First of all, a caveat. I did not get to play this on an original arcade cabinet complete with cool throttle lever. I played it on the Atari Arcade on my iPad. Not ideal. Not ideal at all. But the touchscreen interface allows you to slide your finger on the screen in the same way you would have used the throttle on the cabinet, so I kind of get the fun of it and it is more responsive than a standard joystick. Still, I am probably missing the coolest part of the game.
*I like the HUD on this one; it feels like a step forward in a lot of ways in terms of the data it’s showing the player and the precision of it. You have a counter that shows your fuel and your speed and it’s that speed number that you have to watch once you get into landing mode because you’ve got to get the module down to a slow enough speed that it won’t explode on impact. So you’re really watching that descent speed and feathering that throttle in a way that feels responsive to data/input in a way that a lot of the previous games haven’t.
*As well, this is one of the first arcade games to feature a perspective shift. So, you have your main screen with your landscape below and your module flying above it and then you position yourself and begin your descent. Once you get close enough to the ground, the image shifts to a close-up view of the section of the landscape where you’re going to land, so the module is bigger on the screen and everything. A zoom in, I guess, is what it is. And I hadn’t really realized that every other game we’ve played so far has basically been fixed camera. I mean, on Adventure you could go from screen to screen, but this feels different from that even. And the first time I was playing this game and it happened, it really did surprise me and I was like, “Oh, cool, a zoom in.”
*I think the most positive thing I can say about this game is that it feels very authentic. I mean, the vector graphics and the HUD and the way you use the throttle all feel like you’re actually trying to manipulate a lander. This is what Delman and Moore really wanted. Delman would later say that their first pass at the game, which attempted to be as accurate as possible to the mechanics of actually landing a lunar module remotely, was almost impossible.
*Anyway, my experience of the game was pretty simple. I blew up a few times and then figured out how to do it and I landed successfully a few times and then I was just kind of done.
*At one point, I landed and didn’t blow up, but the game told me it had still been too hard of a landing and the life-support systems got knocked offline and everyone died.
*It awarded me 15 points for that landing.
*I mean, some might say that one should get no points for killing your entire crew. Perhaps even have points deducted.
*Still, let me just say why this game left me pretty cold. I like a lot of the aesthetic choices here. But the thing is that the closer you get to completing your mission, ie. landing the lunar module, you spend all of your time slowing the module down.
*So, you’re maneuvering the module and steering it and everything. And then you start landing and you’re slowing it down and slowing it down and slowing it down and, look, at the end of the day, I just found this game incredibly tedious. Like I was crawling to the finish line each time I landed a module. And I guess it’s just a matter of seconds, but there’s just something weird about playing a video game where you’re trying to go as slow as humanly possible.
*Did anybody else do that thing as kids where you and your friends would have a “slow race,” like see who could walk the slowest? So you’re just pretending that you’re walking through molasses. That’s how playing this game started to feel to me.
*The module is sinking toward the lunar surface and I’d be like, “picking up speed . . . fire thrusters . . . fire thrusters . . . fire thrusters . . . picking up . . . fire thrusters . . . fire thrusters . . .” And it’s like the longer you take to get your module down, the better chance you have of succeeding. That is just such a weird and counterintuitive victory method for a video game.
*This game, it should be mentioned, was one of the very first to include a kind of infinite mode where you could keep playing by feeding quarters into the machine. You start the game with a certain amount of fuel and you can add fuel by putting in quarters. So this game is one of the first to have a real continue mode in the way that most arcade games eventually would.
*I think that’s cool and the ability to continue in the context of an arcade game really opens up the possibilities for arcade cabinets in terms of expanding complexity and story-telling. But, man, this is a weird game to have that mechanic. I mean did people really want to just keep playing this game for hours or whatever? I have no idea why anyone would want to play this game for more than about ten minutes.
*Yeah, yeah, the throttle lever. That thing does look cool.
*Okay, so we are unfortunately closing out 1979, a year that saw my new favorite game of the series, Galaxian, introduced, with a dud in my opinion. I’m prepared to admit that playing this game on the Atari Arcade is a less immersive and fun experience than playing it on an actual arcade cabinet. I’ll admit that.
*But I still just don’t see how, in whatever mode you’re playing it, the game overcomes that kind of fundamental pacing problem where you start each level moving fast and end it moving incredibly slowly. That’s just kind of baked into the concept and I really found it tedious. So, this is another one that I have to say I wouldn’t recommend anyone playing.
*Unless you get a shot at an original arcade cabinet. If I ever do, I’m definitely going to try it.
*Okay, well, we’ve wrapped up 1979 and we’ve talked about the first ten games on the list. And now we stand on the precipice of the 80s and things are about to get bonkers.
*With these first ten games, we covered the first nine years of the list, basically the entire 70s, from 1971’s Oregon Trail to the games from 1979. The next ten games we talk about? Won’t even get us all the way through 1980. 1980 by itself has more games on this list than the entire decade of the 70s.
*Well, looking at the games from 1980, we’ve got some intriguing entries that I can’t wait to revisit (in a couple of cases) or encounter for the very first time. So let’s press on. Join me next time for more tank combat as we take the highway to the Battlezone.