Lode Runner
filfre.net
filfre.net
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.
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.
8 y.o. me was super proud to figure that out :)
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.
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/
It was the first game I got with my Apple //c. Had never even played the original.
With Lode Runner, one could open up the level editor, easily make a custom Lode level, then playtest and share it with friends.
Pinball Construction Set pre-dates Lode Runner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set
In the circles I traveled in, PCS was far more popular than Lode Runner.
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.
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.
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.
If you think it's only the kids' memories that matter, you must work for Google.
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
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 greatly enjoyed the game when it came out, but didn't even know it had a level editor until you mentioned it right now.
Egads, though. It's CTRL-E, not CTRL-G. No idea what I was thinking hours ago.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_and_His_Robot_Factor...
This game was one of our favorites.
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.
Even though I'm a lot better than when I was a kid, I've only made it up to level 14 so far.
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.)
There's no digging in N.
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.
“Nv2-Mac” will damage your computer. You should move it to the Trash.
codesign --remove-signature Nv2-Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/Flash\ PlayerAs 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.
Just reading the name triggered the SFX in my head.
(Its README at https://invent.kde.org/games/kgoldrunneror https://github.com/KDE/kgoldrunner is over a decade out of date, but it looks like the actual code is still being maintained so it compiles, though it may not be getting new development.)
I played countless hours of that with my friends and parents. Good times.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpzN0fagzi8
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSJ5Iuv-0gU
> 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.
The game had arcade versions too (MAME roms). They’re quite fun and have aged much better than a lot of games.
I found this on the quarter taking version.
this web game is a pretty good recreation of the game http://loderunnerwebgame.com/game/
As an aside, those Apple 2 analog joysticks were truly awful.
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.
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.
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...
To this day I can't enjoy the other versions as much as this one.