Lunar Lander
A thrust button, a fuel gauge, and an argument with momentum.
The original
Atari's vector-graphics cabinet took a game that had been circulating on teletypes and minicomputers through the seventies — Jim Storer's 1969 BASIC lander is the usual starting point — and gave it a screen, a throttle and a crowd. The job never changed: put the craft down slowly enough, on ground flat enough, with the fuel you have.
How it played
There was gravity pulling down and a thrust lever in your hand, and that was the entire control scheme. The trick, which the game never explains and everybody learns the same way, is that you are not steering — you are cancelling. Every bit of sideways drift you pick up early has to be paid back later, in fuel you would rather have kept for the landing itself.
The cabinet's throttle was analogue, so the game had genuine feel in a way a keyboard version does not. The screen showed you altitude, horizontal speed and vertical speed as numbers, and part of learning the game was learning to fly on those numbers rather than on the picture.
What it left behind
It is the ancestor of every game where the real opponent is your own momentum. The lesson it teaches — that fuel is a clock, and that a correction is never free — turns up any time a game asks you to manoeuvre in vacuum, from Thrust and Gravitar to modern rocket sandboxes.
Made by
Atari
First appeared
1979
On
Arcade
Genre
Physics
Taken after by
The build on this site that owes it.