A crazy memory I have with this game is related to its successor, Championship Lode Runner (mentioned in the article). The original allowed you to jump to any level through its title screen, so you could skip hard levels, or play them in any order you want. The Championship game, however, had 50 levels that you could only play through in order, and only after you had beaten the prior level. As my brother and I got stuck in one of of the lower levels, this was very frustrating since we had no way of enjoying the higher, more advanced levels.
Somewhere along the line, we figured out that you could start the original game, go to the level-jumping screen, remove the 5 1/4" original floppy disc and replace it with the one for the Championship game, and then enter the level you wanted to play. The original gameplay would load the Championship level as if nothing was out of the ordinary! I only think this was possible because the two games shared so much code structure. It gave me an idea of how the memory vs disc model of the game was operating. But I don't think it would be easy to do today since switching the floppy discs was so instrumental to making it work. Maybe today you could do kernel dumps or swap the in-memory vs disk binaries, but we were just kids not advanced computer wizards. Hurray for analog hacks!
By using the trick we were able to enjoy all 50 of the Championship levels at our leisure.
In the Apple II game "Below The Root", was a side-scrolling RPG kind of like early Zelda games, and you could use the floppy drive to wall-hack.
Every time you walked from one screen to another, it would load the new screen from disk. If you removed the disk from the drive before walking to a new screen, it would grind the empty drive for a while, but eventually it would just use the old screen layout for the new screen but still "think" you were in the new tile.
So lets say you had 3 screens 1-2-3 and '2' has an obstacle but '1' does not. You could:
1) walk to the right hand edge of screen 1
2) remove the floppy
3) cross to screen 2 - this would appear to reset you to the left side of screen 1
4) put the floppy back in
5) walk to right side of the "fake" screen 1 and cross to the next screen again
6) presto - you're now on screen 3! Obstacle avoided!
And you could repeat step (3) multiple times to teleport across an arbitrary # of screens.
Floppies were magic for me as a kid. Somehow way cooler than an Atari 2600 cart. My uncle had some variant of the Apple II in his basement. One night while the adults were visiting, I was down there excitedly playing the various games (The Dark Crystal, Loderunner, and Olympic Decathlon are the ones that come immediately to mind). I'd take one game out of the driver, drop it on the desk, and insert the next game. By the end of the night there was a sloppy pile of floppies that had previously been individual sheathed in a nice 'rolodex'. My parents called down and when I tried to spend the time to clean up my mess they made it pretty clear I needed to be up there 'right now'. So I foolishly left the pile rather than face my parents' wrath. I'm sure my uncle was furious when he found the pile; those things were fragile and I had treated them like they were Duplo. The next time I was at my uncle's house I wasn't allowed to play. :(
For floppy swapping madness, Wasteland is the game that comes to mind for me. The game was split across two floppy disks, each covering roughly half of the map. When you'd enter a section that was on the other disk, the game would ask you to swap disks. The game state was saved on the disk on which the action occurred, so you could enter an unaltered world just by putting in a fresh copy of the game disk. This was useful for continuing to play after you'd beaten the game, as well as leveling up your characters to extreme levels and collecting multiple copies of rare or hard-to-get items.
Find a game disk that was a demo (like from a magazine). It must have a main ELF, that would then launch another ELF from the disk. (For example, the main menu would be one ELF, and then each demo game would be another elf). Create an iso, then replace one of the game ELFs with whatever executable you wanted. The resulting iso must have the same layout, with every file at the same location. Burn it to disk. Tear apart the PS2 and remove the top of the disk drive. There's a little white plastic piece with a magnet that clamps down the disk, remove that from the lid of the disk drive. Put the original disk in the drive, clamp down the disk with the magnet, and boot it up to the menu screen of the demo disk. Without hitting the eject button, use your finger to stop the drive, lift out the original disk, set in your burned one, put the magnet on top, and choose to run the game that corresponds to the ELF you replaced. Voila.
You reminded me of a similar bug we exploited for "Bards Tale 3" on the C64. Bards Tale had a character loader that would prompt you to insert your character disk to load characters from. It turns out that using other non Bards Tale disks (i.e. "Batman: The Movie") would yield corrupted characters, some with excess hit points or unusual items which could be given to your existing characters.
I used a hex editor to hack my BT1 save disk to give my characters XP and gold. I miscalculated or mis-converted the XP, and my characters all wound up around level 900. I would leave a weight on the key to "interview" at the school to advance a level, and watch TV for 20 minutes while they all leveled up.
I had a real story with hacking the Centauri Alliance save disk, which had a bit more obfuscation. I figure there's about 3 people who care, and they're all going to see this HN thread, so: https://davidkrider.com/hacking-centauri-aliance/
What made Lode Runner the must-have game to have is that it was the first game with a built in level editor. Before Lode Runner, once one finished all of the levels in a game, it was time to move on to another game. To make custom levels, one needed to program their own game in Basic.
With Lode Runner, one could open up the level editor, easily make a custom Lode level, then playtest and share it with friends.
Apparently PCS was very well received too, winning awards and having strong sales. Interesting that it has largely disappeared into the mists but Lode Runner is in the pantheon of great early video games.
It reminds me a little of Wizardry vs. Ultima. They were the first two huge RPG franchises, but Wizardry has mostly vanished from the collective consciousness and Ultima had far more staying power.
PCS disappearing when Lode Runner didn't can be explained simply: it played a bad pinball, and it was itself a kind of clone.
The thing PCS did is just one step in a lineage of pinball simulation software, starting with the Atari "Video Pinball" games and progressing through to today's games from Zen(Pinball FX) and Farsight(Pinball Arcade), as well as open source solutions like Visual Pinball. The construction feature was really novel and I used it too as a kid, but it doesn't really exist as a "game design" - it's software first, kind of like flight simulators. Early flight sims aren't very well remembered, although they can have a retro aesthetic appeal. [0]
Lode Runner, on the other hand, is still Lode Runner in all its forms. It isn't a simulation of anything - the game pieces have a concrete, Chess-like logic to them. It's hard to improve upon just by adding "stuff" as the 1994 version did. And the game is easy enough to clone that many people, myself included, played people's clones of it.
Are you kidding me? Everyone who was into computers back in the 80s remembers the chunky look of MFS/Sublogic Flight Simulator 1.0 through 4.0. When Chuck Yeager died, more than one Hackernews remarked of how they discovered him through Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer back in the day.
But are the kids rediscovering those specific games? That's the "memory" we're talking about here. Flight simulation was very prominent as a genre in that time, but it barely enters into the coverage of any present-day "history of video games", let alone topping the lists.
That probably has more to do with the fact that "history of video games" style retrospectives skew heavily towards arcade and console releases rather than computer games. If you are into retrocomputing, of course flight sims top the list of the most important titles. There are some systems for which a flight sim was the only graphical game ever officially released. For others, like the IBM PC, flight sims were a benchmark of compatibility in a time when compatibility didn't have a set definition -- vendors who could get the PC releases of MFS and Lotus running on their machines had a pretty solid claim to being "100% IBM compatible". So they are a critical part of the history of the platform.
As for whether "the kids" are rediscovering them, they don't appear in classic game compilations (which, again, skew console-y), but retrocomputing YouTubers like the 8-Bit Guy and LGR rekindle interest in these titles. Inasmuch as young people are interested in classic computers, they will come across these old flight sims.
OTOH, flight sims (especially on 8-bit and early 16-bit platforms) were pretty much the opposite of a "casual game" - you didn't only have to put up with the blocky graphics, you also had to memorize the keyboard layout, be motivated enough to master the steep learning curve etc. So these were pretty divisive games with a lot of die-hard fans, but I guess 80-90% of gamers (me included) would steer well clear of them, or try them once and give up...
Wizardry, like Lode Runner and Spelunker, is a well beloved old favorite in Japan - appearing on PC and consoles.
Lode Runner and Spelunker even have Switch ports.
The people who'd worked on the original Dragon Quest saw Wizardry and were inspired to create a pared down RPG for two buttons and a d-pad consoles
PCS and Racing Destruction Set were beyond huge on the Atari 8bits. I never heard of Lode Runner until after the 8-bit scene began to wane and I got into the Apple IIgs (which of course promptly waned as well).
Racing Destruction Set and Nuclear War are maybe the first games I remember playing on a friend's C64. Building levels was the bigger part of the fun. Changing to low gravity so that when your car hit a mine, it flew up in the air and maybe never came down. Pretty amazing for that computing power, at least what my memory is recreating. It really was an early taste of the PC's true power, as an authoring tool.
Though once my parents got an Apple ][e and someone gave me some pirated games, Dig Dug, Hard Hat Mack, Robotron and especially Lode Runner were all I thought about. The last I think was so successful because while you died a lot trying to figure out the choreography on a level, the motion was so fluid-feeling that it was a joy to play, and die, and play.
I think what made it so addictive was the weird AI. They felt unpredictable and odd - sometimes they'd get stuck, sometimes they'd surprise you and go the "wrong" way and end up cutting you off... I never figured out the logic to those lil' characters!
That level editor was a thing of beauty. It inspired me to write my own level editors for other games. Ugly text based things that worked by editing the (cracked) game's data files. I learned so much doing that kind of thing.
I once had a VC20 or so and Lode Runner on loan for a holiday season and stumbled into that editor while trying out every key on the keyboard to see what it does. When I gave it back after the holidays my friend was flabbergasted he had a game with a level editor and didn't even know about it. That loan payed off in an unexpected way.
Agreed. If I recall correctly, around the same time, Electronic Arts was capturing some similar success by releasing several games with "Construction Set" in the name. Did Lode Runner inspire this?
A lesser known Lode Runner clone that I particularly enjoyed was "Mr. Robot and his Robot Factory," [1] though the Wikipedia page claims the gameplay was more similar to Miner 2049er. I think the addition of a level builder made it less like Miner and more like Lode Runner.
I spent hours and hours designing tracks in Racing Destruction Set as a kid. Gave me a life-long love of cars and physics too. In some ways it was the great-great-great-grandparent of Kerbal Space Program.
My brother and I were raised by a single mom. Getting our first computer (my first computer, as my brother wasn't interested) - a Commodore 64 - was a watershed moment. I couldn't believe it the day my mom got it and brought it home. This was when it's prices were getting slashed to prices should could kind of afford (approximately 1984-85). I pulled it out of the box after nearly breaking her neck with hugs and put it all together, hooking it up with to a massive, very pale and low contrast wooden cabinet color TV.
And then it dawned on me. I had no way to play any games! I actually needed a disk drive (something that nearly cost as much as the compute itself!). For the first couple of weeks, I entered lines of BASIC I either read in the manual or from the back of magazines.
When we finally got the drive, I could feel the surge of power! This would have been 9th grade - my last year of middle school where I went to school. I remember grousing about it during math class that I finally had all this gear and no money to buy the games for it. A guy ahead of me turned around and said he could bring me a stack of disks tomorrow.
We became solid best friends. That dude had a modem and was able to pull down "free" games from his telephone line all night long. It was the darkest, most seductive black magic I'd ever heard of.
I remember getting a copy of Top Gun before it was even available for retail. Crap game, but I thought it was something magical at the time.
The floppy disk was a life changer.
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For what it's worth, Lode Runner was one of my favorite games as a kid. And it was one of the few my brother really liked, too. In fact, he was better at solving the puzzles than I was. I have multiple versions of the game for C64 to this very day, including a boxed cart.
I love Lode Runner. Great article - thanks for posting it.
All of what you've said applies to me as well. I found this particularly implementation a year or so ago. The nostalgia is great but it's still a genuinely fun game. I've probably only made it to level 8.
If you like Lode Runner, then you owe it to yourself to try N, which I consider to be its spiritual successor. Think Lode Runner but with deliciously smooth platforming physics. It's freeware and was a originally a Flash game from 2005, but has since also been made available (still free) for Win/Mac/Linux, as well as for consoles. Highly recommended. http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html
This is an old-school clone, written using the old ways (direct calls to Xlib for display). An SDL port exists if that tickles your fancy more.
(Note that game clones technically violate copyright, per Atari v. Philips and Tetris Holdings v. Xio, but the rightsholders to Lode Runner don't seem terribly interested in defending their IP against cloners.)
I loved both N and Lode Runner, but I would disagree that N is a spiritual successor. While it does follow the template of simple puzzle-platforming with emergent complexity and skill, the critical defining Lode Runner gimmick is missing.
I agree it's more like jumpman but I wouldn't say it's a successor to either.
I'd say that it's a (relatively) modern interpretation of simple platformers that could work performantly on the flash runtime in 2005. Jumpman being a seminal early simple single-screen platformer offers obvious parallels but not more than if someone made a simple FPS today would be "the successor to doom(1993)", if that makes sense.
That probably means that the binary isn't signed. You can either remove the quarantine attr with xattr in terminal or open system preferences -> security and click "allow" for that app, and then try again. macOS has the stance that binaries off the internet are less safe when not signed.
Some searching suggests this is a problem that dates back to the original Mac release in 2013, some users were getting this error and the devs couldn't reproduce it on their Mac so they just disabled signatures altogether to fix it; presumably Macs have become more strict about requiring a signature since then.
"Still, none of this background would be remembered by anyone who actually played the game. Instead the supposed Bungeling guards would become popularly known as "mad
monks," which their pudgy low-resolution shapes rather resembled. Doubtless plenty of imaginative young gamers made up new narratives of their own to fit the bizarre image
of greedy monks chasing an intrepid adventurer up and down a maze of scaffolding dotted with gold."
As a kid, I didn't think of arcade games in terms of words, so the elaborate backgrounds and characters that game authors made up for their arcade games didn't matter, and I was rarely even aware of them.
I related to the games on an intuitive level, and just watching someone play without any words being exchanged or thought was enough for me to get it and play myself.
RPG's were different. There the actual background and characters mattered.
So much so that the first 6502 arcade game I wrote was a Lode Runner derivative called “The Heist”.
Levels consisted of floors and stair steps, and there were different types of art on the walls you could steal, including an easy one and a hard one (based on the location puzzle) of low and high value.
You could cut through floors and use ropes to rappel up or down. Some walkways were blocked by storage boxes you could push, including push into a hole in the floor which jammed and filled the hole.
Guards patrolled on beats. If close enough to you, they could shoot you. You could pick up a bucket of water from janitors, and slosh it on the floor to make the guard slide one way or another, or fall into a hole you’d cut.
You could “turn out the lights” at a light switch. The effect would be you could only see within a certain radius. Gaurds couldn’t see you any more, but also, you couldn’t see them unless close enough.
Most logic was AppleSoft Basic, while the drawing routines were 6502 so falling and sliding and throwing the water would be smooth.
Lode Runner got me into coaxing machines to do what I imagined, instead of just using what others did.
Wow, that brings back a lot of memories! Waiting for the dilating camera aperature to open at the beginning of each level. The digging and falling sounds. The reflexes needed to move, drill, and trap the bad guys. This was definitely a classic.
I grew up on Sierra's version of Lode Runner. As I read this series of game history, it's a reflective process of realizing that my own childhood experiences with computers were part of a cultural moment shaping several generations. As a CS education researcher, I sometimes have conversations trying to balance my sense that these simpler games offer rich learning opportunities to beginners with the recognition that my nostalgia for a time and place doesn't transfer to much value for the next generation. That said, has anyone seen modern re-implementations of Lode Runner or its kin, perhaps in Python, which would be suitable for analyzing program structure/hacking/teaching the basics of state-based AI?
I know of KGoldrunner. That looks to be around 10,000 lines of C++. I have no idea how approachable the code base is, but it’s definitely smaller than I expected, which is promising.
Way too much time spent on this game. I think it might have been the first video game I spent a considerable amount of time on. Monochromatic Apple II with a box joystick which was bent out of shape.... still great to play with though. Great game for the era.
What a coincidence, currently replaying Lode Runner: The Legend Returns. I am too young to have played the original in its time and have nostalgia for it, so I kindly disagree with the author and find The Legend Returns far more enjoyable.
Lode Runner was huge in our house on the C64, but I think Jumpman[1] and Fort Apocalypse[2] were played a lot more. We even caught our parents having 2am marathon sessions with Jumpman, which was not normal.
Same here. Two other huge games for me were H.E.R.O. [1] and Dropzone [2] (the latter a re-imagining of Defender), both of which have a lot in common with Fort Apocalypse.
Both are still extremely playable. Dropzone in particular has some great graphics for its time. It was made by Archer Maclean, who's more known for International Karate/International Karate+, which I also played incessantly as a kid.
Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, and Pitfall 2 also come to mind as examples of classic early platformers.
> At the start of the pandemic, a friend gave me all of his old Atari 2600 carts. A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to trying Miniature Golf. The graphics are terrible by any post-1982 standard, and the hand-drawn screenshots in the paper catalogs of yesteryear made it look worse, so hardly anyone bought it. But it's actually a pretty good game. You can sit down with and play for several hours while relaxing, instead of gnashing your teeth and swearing at other players.
loderunner is a game my mother really loves, however, while playing this game, it is the only time I've heard my mother swear...a lot! as well as jump up and down in frustration and rage quit. But she always went back and played it.
Lode Runner is definitely one of my favorites of all time. But the favorite, which I genuinely believe is the best game of all time and I've been playing games over a four decade at this point, is Hollow Knight.
Oh, no doubt. I just wanted the parent poster to know that there are creative masterpieces out there that deserve checking out. Lode Runner is good but not enough to not check other games out.
I loved this game. I first played a ported version of Lode Runner on a sinclair spectrum clone in the 80s, I was less than 10 years old. I love The digita antiquarian, he brings back sweet memories
I remember playing Lode Runner The Legend Returns as a kid. My parents had a Mac Performa 6200 sitting around gathering dust, so I would mess around with it when I wasn't playing NES. The thing is still sitting around, but doesn't boot. Even took the time to replace the PRAM battery with the custom part that takes AAA batteries :(
Lode Runner was one of my very first game on Commodore 64, although not my favorite. I was in primary school. A schoolmate gave me a tape with a few games on it, including "lode runner". Every week we would get new original games. There was a lot of creativity on these constrained 8-bit computers.
I'd be at school, creating levels on graph paper and playing them in my head. Then at home, with the level editor test them out. Some levels really took an hour to play.
This was on a C64 with a digital joystick, which I found more playable than on an Apple II with an analog joystick.
If you are into retro games or retro tech in general, I run a twitter account highlighting adverts from old tech magazines like Byte, Compute! and Antic.
It's funny that it's an American game because afaik one of the last good and most important implementations of it - the 5-player deathmatch version Battle Lode Runner on the TG-16 - was a Japanese exclusive
Oh that was a name I fondly remember. I never had the patience and intelligence to move past a certain level, but it was very fun to play, and I believe by hitting ESC you got a lot of options like skipping levels.
Times were simpler, but the old games are still fun.
At the start of the pandemic, a friend gave me all of his old Atari 2600 carts. A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to trying Miniature Golf. The graphics are terrible by any post-1982 standard, and the hand-drawn screenshots in the paper catalogs of yesteryear made it look worse, so hardly anyone bought it. But it's actually a pretty good game. You can sit down with and play for several hours while relaxing, instead of gnashing your teeth and swearing at other players.
Ditto for the regular Atari 2600 Golf. Looks terrible. But once you go a few rounds, it's a really nice game.
This reminds me of Doctor Who from the 70s and 80s. The effects, props, costumes, etc were absolutely awful. But the stories were, generally, great.
Most people dismiss Atari 2600 because they cannot get past the visual “deficiencies “by today’s standards. But if you can suspend that and play a game like Adventure or Golf, you might find yourself hitting the reset button to play again for several hours...
Great game. The version I had on the Atari 400/800 was super fun. It had a level editor and during one summer I pretty much spent my day building a level for my Dad to play when he got home.
Wow, today I learned that the Lode Runner I played as a kid (the 1994 version) wasn't the original! I also spent many more hours in the level editor than the game.
When reading the article I saw the screenshot — and it wasn’t nostalgia per se, more like a kind of excitement I had long forgotten. Such a weird experience!
Somewhere along the line, we figured out that you could start the original game, go to the level-jumping screen, remove the 5 1/4" original floppy disc and replace it with the one for the Championship game, and then enter the level you wanted to play. The original gameplay would load the Championship level as if nothing was out of the ordinary! I only think this was possible because the two games shared so much code structure. It gave me an idea of how the memory vs disc model of the game was operating. But I don't think it would be easy to do today since switching the floppy discs was so instrumental to making it work. Maybe today you could do kernel dumps or swap the in-memory vs disk binaries, but we were just kids not advanced computer wizards. Hurray for analog hacks!
By using the trick we were able to enjoy all 50 of the Championship levels at our leisure.