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Comment by strenholme | Hacker News Reader

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.

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the first game with a built in level editor

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.

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.

[0] https://youtu.be/BEkDRa--YaY

> Early flight sims aren't very well remembered

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.

But are the kids rediscovering those specific games? That's the "memory" we're talking about here.

If you think it's only the kids' memories that matter, you must work for Google.

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).

Remembering Some Games!

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.

Lode Runner was incredibly addictive even without the level editor.

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.

Ctrl-g man.

You might not have known that was there without reading the manual. And you might not have had a manual to read if, well, you know.

I will not confirm or deny trying every key and every ctrl sequence on the keyboard as a standard first step on every game that I “got”.

Egads, though. It's CTRL-E, not CTRL-G. No idea what I was thinking hours ago.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_and_His_Robot_Factor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_Destruction_Set

This game was one of our favorites.

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.

https://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/Checkerboard_Construction...

I have fond memories of spending hours making and testing new levels, and exchanging them with my friends.

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