Despite playing hours and hours of Elite on the school BBCs before we got a room full of Archimedes machines, I've only just today noticed that Lander was also made by David Braben.
We had that too, think our copy was just called ‘Water’. Spent a lot of my teenage coding experimenting trying to recreate that, but none of the engines I had access to were suitable for the task as they didn’t have direct pixel access. Wasn’t till I learnt Processing way later that I managed to replicate it.
Wish I’d shared my replication around more because this was a good 8 or so years before the “falling sand game” genre got memetic.
(who's up next?)
+ Nevryon (rip off of R-Type)
They were pretty much the only games we actually bought, rather than just demos from cover disks, so I played the absolute heck out of them.
Even after many hours of flying time, I could never stick the landings in Chocks Away.