50 Years of Video Games: Lunar Lander (Arcade)
In 1969, mankind took its first steps on the moon, and with video games rising in popularity fairly shortly after, it’s no surprise that developers wanted to put such a momentous feat in the player’s hands. Lunar landing focused video games have been part of the genre since the start, although technicalities on what qualifies as a video game may mean some of the dry simulations capturing such a concept might not even be part of this push. Many of the lunar landing games released before 1979 would be quickly forgotten though when Atari stepped in with their own version of the moon landing a decade after the real world event. By focusing on a graphical interface instead of text and numbers and of course being released by the biggest name in video games at the time, Lunar Lander would end up becoming such a popular embodiment of the concept of landing a spacecraft on the moon that it is now often the first game brought up when talking about this small genre.
Lunar Lander is a 2D black and white game where the goal is to safely land your lunar landing module on the moon, but the first complication to this is the rather mountainous area that serves as your only landing option. Near the center of the screen is a large mountain that stands tall above the other surroundings, but the moon’s surface has other smaller rock formations extending upwards as well. Landing in the valleys between these rough and dangerous parts of the moon surface would certainly be the smart way to go, but when you start a round of Lunar Lander, the game indicates a set of four possible target locations you need to aim for. Some of these will always be in those safe looking valleys, but the game incentivizes you to go for the riskier landing spots by having the score multiplier be higher if you’re willing to go for landing areas on the sides of the mountains. These multipliers can range from the two times multiplier reserved for the relatively easy valleys up to a five times multiplayer if it’s on a particularly precarious area or one with a lot of uneven ground.
A single play session of Lunar Lander won’t be particularly long since it usually will only involve one successful or unsuccessful landing, but your reward for safely setting down on the moon’s surface is to be able to try again. However, there is a fuel system limiting the potential for reasonably attempting a second round unless you go for the easier locations. Whether you’re trying for just one good landing or trying to squeeze in two, this is a game that feels defined by its points rather than its successes since merely trying to land isn’t nearly as hard or fulfilling as going for the tougher spots. The gameplay of Lunar Lander is meant to be inherently hard though, the challenge coming almost entirely from trying to control your shockingly delicate lander.
When a round of Lunar Lander starts you’re practically chucked in from screen left, the lunar lander coming in at a fairly high speed that you’ll likely need to immediately counteract with your thrusters. Based on the position of your landing module as you rotate it to angle yourself better, the thrusters will begin to counteract your horizontal or vertical speed, the game giving some helpful readouts in the top right so you can try to micromanage your descent. Micromanaging is actually the biggest factor to your success, since one you start to drift down towards the moon’s surface, it is imperative you come towards the ground at an incredibly slow speed and at the perfect angle. If your lander doesn’t land flat on its legs or you come in slightly too fast, prepare to see your craft explode into bits. The game is incredibly finicky, pretty much any drop speed above a single digit risky and anything above twenty bound to end poorly. Counteracting the pull of gravity and that initial hurling in at the start of a round is key to ease your spacecraft down ever so gradually, the game all about threading the needle required to safely set down on the lunar surface. It is a system you can get a good feel for rather quickly, the physics making sense despite how demanding they are of perfection, but that preciseness mostly feels pertinent for 4x and 5x multiplier spots. You still need to be careful touching down when its the wider and simpler valleys of course, but the added wiggle room can make simply landing safely a bit mundane after you understand the controls. Conversely, the high scoring spots are so strict that the buildup to trying to land on them can feel like a mildly satisfying payoff to all that work or cause mild frustration when it seems like it only barely didn’t work out.
If you are about to hit the surface and realize you can’t counteract your downward velocity with pure thruster force though, the game does give you an Abort button that propels you up and away but at the cost of a lot of fuel being burnt. If you’re going for a tough spot this is both a blessing and a curse as it can prevent you from possibly doing yourself in, but getting to those positions safely often involves using a lot of your fuel tank already, hence why a second successful round on the same quarter is often out of the picture. Oddly enough, you can get more fuel by just feeding more and more quarters into the machine to make it easier. Putting in extra quarters to get around the difficulty won’t make it feel like you’re getting extra rounds for touching down safely though and instead it feels more like you’re just continuing on with those extra credits you fed in. This can lead to the unfortunate truth that you can just pay your way to high scores too, going for easier landings with high fuel counts meaning a richer player can steal the bragging rights from someone who went for the risky and difficult landings to make the most of what they could pay.
One annoying feature exists too in the form of an obnoxious beeping that activates when you’re below 100 units of fuel, the game that relies so much on intense focus to get the minutiae of your landing right adding a nagging distraction. On the other hand Lunar Lander does provide a small aid when you start to near the moon’s surface, the view zooming in some so you have a better idea of your craft’s position and the exact layout of the surface below. The shift isn’t too disorienting unless you’re already going at a speed you shouldn’t be if you want to win that round so it feels like a pure benefit, but the alarm for low fuel hardly feels needed when you’re already watching those numbers near the top of the screen closely enough that it probably won’t escape your notice that you’re running out of the means to arrange yourself.
There is a purely aesthetic touch that makes Lunar Lander have a touch of personality. While most of it will be about managing those shifting numbers properly for a landing, once you have touched down or crashed you will get a message that doesn’t just tell you how you did and provide any points you earned but also gets a little colorful in phrasing things. There are different messages for both a clean landing and a lightly rough one, and while you might get the pretty positive “Congratulations, The Eagle Has Landed” for a smooth one, a rough one will immediately notify you that this will be a one way trip for the crew or say the communication system was destroyed by the bumpy touchdown. A crash will admonish you for destroying a 100 Megabuck Lander or tell you you left a crater two miles wide. A myth of sorts arose that one of these messages would even tell you you destroyed the only McDonald’s restaurants on the moon or that landing in the right spot would let you pop out and grab a bite to eat, but this seems to be just a case of Lunar Lander’s popularity swallowing up that unusual Easter egg found instead in the 1973 Moonlander game that Atari certainly drew inspiration from. It doesn’t have anything as wild as a McDonald’s visit, but Lunar Lander having those little messages to guilt you some for different types of failure definitely leans into the game’s urging that you be perfect in your work.
To perhaps give itself a bit more substance than just trying the same landing gameplay but at harder spots on the moon’s surface, Lunar Lander provides four modes of play. These impact elements like the degree of influence gravity and friction have on your lander as well as determining whether or not your rotating of the module will be impacted by the momentum of the low gravity atmosphere of the moon. In Training Mission gravity is low and friction is present, this meaning it is easier to counteract your descent since friction helps slow the craft while the gravity is weak enough to counteract reliably. Cadet Mission pumps up the gravity some and removes the friction though so you have to work more with the engine to avoid a crash, and Prime Mission makes the gravity high enough that you’ll really need to push to fight the fall and your descent can rapidly accelerate if you’re not careful. Command Mission is the most unique though, friction absent and gravity at a moderate level but whenever you try to rotate your lander so that you can use the jets to fight the appropriate directional momentum, it will attempt to continue rotating. You can quickly stop the spin by inputting a bit of force in the opposite direction, but this makes an already fiddly game involve even more fiddling on top of it. Command Mission ends up the hardest because this complication means you have a new variable to micromanage and having multiple difficulty settings at least means it won’t feel like you’ve conquered the game the moment you hit a 5x multiplier spot, but in a game that’s already defined by having to futz with the craft, making it more demanding just means more time spent doing the dull task of constantly making slight adjustments to your momentum.
THE VERDICT: Lunar Lander’s gameplay challenge is fairly simplistic and easy to grow tired of for it, that gradual drop down to the surface managed with little bursts of the engine not terribly exciting. The difficulty makes it demanding without it really feeling like it’s asking more from the player beyond either adding more quarters in to simplify the process or being patient enough to spend more time lightly adjusting the descent of the lander module. Having extra modes with altered variables doesn’t really get to the heart of Lunar Lander’s issue, that being going for low scoring spots is a rather plain process while aiming for higher multipliers just leads to a lot of tepid micromanagement so you can meet the strict success requirements.
And so, I give Lunar Lander for arcade machines…
A BAD rating. If someone who struggles with the physics finally makes them click well enough to land in one of those high scoring spots, Lunar Lander can certainly provide a sudden surge of satisfaction. However, the efficacy of such a payoff requires them to first not grasp the physics at play and grapple with them in a way that makes the victory sweet. Landing in those two times multiplier valleys does allow for some training before you hit the bigger stuff, but the actual landing spots on mountainsides or in tight valleys feels less like a big challenge requiring smarts and skill to overcome and more a test of your patience. The game asks if you are you willing to constantly manage the momentum to slowly settle down on the moon’s surface and doesn’t make the process interesting enough to really motivate you to want to do so once you realize how demanding it is. There is always the siren’s call of something relatively simple still requiring some effort to finally successfully complete that prevents Lunar Lander’s gameplay from just being a tedious process of trying to make sure the right numbers are low enough. Gauging how well the thruster fights the force of gravity could qualify as a skill but it’s not one that really adds the extra depth the play would need to avoid feeling like you’re just lightly pushing something in place until you see if it turns out well. One could almost compare it to hanging a portrait and that little struggle to make sure the frame won’t tilt to one side, the process requiring some awareness and adjustment but it’s not really something inherently enjoyable even if seeing the end result can be a good release after all of the fiddling done to get things in place.
Lunar Lander likely became a hit in its time because it did bring the fantasy of landing on the moon in with a very rudimentary approach to the simulation genre that wasn’t as inaccessible as earlier attempts like the purely text-based games. Simulation games do need to include the restrictions of their real world counterparts but a lunar landing is certainly more complex with this and has more tools available than just spinning around and firing your thruster. Atari certainly wasn’t going for an accurate simulation though and instead wanted to make it fun in an arcade setting, and impressing others by landing at a hard spot might have been part of the appeal. An impact of a social climate that could only exist around its release unfortunately doesn’t linger with the game now, the adjustments feeling like a thankless task, especially when failure is so close that having a single number a few digits too high or your landing spot a little off can lead to an abrupt loss. That surge of relief from an excellent landing shouldn’t be discounted, but it’s partly because the micromanaging is so bothersome that you can get that satisfying sensation. To return to the use of the phrase “threading the needle” before to describe the play, once you thread a needle you can begin to do something more interesting than simply pushing a string through a hole. In Lunar Lander, the challenge is that delicate threading and trying to do it with harder settings just makes you have to struggle more to properly get through that needle that doesn’t have much of a point after.