Talk:Lunar Lander (video game genre)

Lander vs Lunar Lander

the new Lander (by Psygnosis, 1999) addition made the whole article pop up under the "1999 computer and video games" catagory. perhaps to fix this an additional "Lander" redirect article should be made, as the 1999 game is called "Lander" not "Lunar Lander".

I have created a new page for Lander and slightly edited the text here. I don't know what I'm doing with the categorisations so I haven't edited those, but it may need removing from this page now. JammyB 19:06, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

now fixed categorisations and added Lander (video game) link to "see also" section of article. Roidroid (talk) 09:29, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks!

Brouhaha, thanks for the GT40 infobox (and picture)! I still wish I had one of those (systems). By the way, if you've ever seen the VT-55-based simulation of that game (that ran on RSTS/E, RSX-11, and OS/8), I'm the one who wrote that. It started as BASIC-PLUS but I migrated it to PAL-11 and PAL-8 machine language for improved speed of execution. On RSTS/E, it was actually a multi-user Run-time system.

Atlant 13:13, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Phil Budne and I developed VT11(GT4x)/VS60 support for the SIMH PDP-11 simulation, now hosted at GIThub. You have to disable the DZ and enable the VT device before running the Lunar Lander program. RT-11 (through version 5.3) could add VT11/VS60 support during SYSGEN, after which it could use the display like a glass Teletype (.GT ON), and EDIT and TECO would show the text being edited on the display. — DAGwyn 71.121.204.138 (talk) 05:05, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Game Boy Advance

Anyone know anything about the GBA version? I don't, but it's in the category and a quick search confirms its existence. --Mgreenbe 19:40, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Proposed split

A split has been proposed sind August 2006. Seems a good idea to me. Rl 09:14, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Against. The Atari game is clearly derived from the PDP-11 one (as indicated by the screenshots). And it looks like all the variants are at least somewhat related. For that reason and also simply because the subject matter is the same so any splitting would end up duplicating a bunch of description. Paul Koning 17:37, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

For. Unless you can find documentation that one came from the other, its pure speculation and WP:OR. --Marty Goldberg 06:11, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

LUNAR for CDC Cyber

There's also a Lunar Lander game for the CDC mainframes. It's roughly contemporary with the PDP-11 version, perhaps a bit older. It differs from the others discussed here because it shows a view from the cockpit -- out the window (you see sky or terrain) and at the instruments. This makes it substantially harder because you don't have the "big picture" view. Paul Koning 17:35, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Lunar Lander (video game genre)/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Indrian (talk · contribs) 03:50, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

I'll give this one a go. Indrian (talk) 03:50, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Lead

•  Done"must use their limited fuel to control the rocket so as to land safely" - Technically, the fuel does not control the rocket, the thrusters expend fuel in the process of controlling the rocket. Just needs slightly better word choice.
  • The whole wording is a bit weird. I'll take a look at how to rewrite it so as to make sense from an astrophysical standpoint. I hope PresN doesn't mind! → Call me Razr Nation 19:55, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
  • To add, PresN: Can I assume that the game is called Lunar Lander because the player is tasked with landing on the Moon, or there are other celestial bodies to land on? After all, the Moon's latin name is Luna. → Call me Razr Nation 19:59, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
    • @Razr Nation: It's awkward, actually- the original "Lunar Landing Game" was just on the moon, and therefore the genre/game type name is "Lunar Lander", and the moon is certainly the standard target, but games that have you land on different bodies (real or fictional) are still "lunar landers" as long as the gameplay is similar. So, I didn't want to define it in the lead as "you must land on the moon" because, for example, Marslander (1983) is a Lunar Lander game but, uh, not on the moon. --PresN 00:03, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
      • @PresN:: Huh, it's quite awkward indeed. I went ahead and did some changes. I think that we can keep the lead as "landing on the moon" and specify which games have a different celestial body as the target, given how they are the minority (and also to keep the text semantically correct). → Call me Razr Nation 00:19, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Text games

•  Done"Storer soon forgot about the game" - I am not sure this statement is really needed. It comes out of nowhere in the paragraph in which it is included and really does not tie into any other ideas in the article.
•  Done"Lunar inspired others to write other versions of the game" - This may be true, as it seems odd that three different people would come up with such a similar concept even with the actual moon landings providing an obvious inspiration, but I do not believe the source supports this contention.
•  Done"Many of these ports were originally mainframe computer games" - Remember, in 1973 there were no personal computers, so the 1973 version of the book consisted entirely of games written for mainframes and minicomputers and was intended for use with mainframes and minicomputers. It was not until the re-release in 1978 that it explicitly targeted the microcomputer crowd and became a million seller.
•  Done"more sales than computers in existence at the time" - IBM had an install base of 35,000 System 360 computers by 1970 and also sold 12,000 1401 computers between 1959 and 1971. DEC sold 50,000 PDP-8 computers after its 1965 release, and while some of those sales may have come after 1973, DEC had released the PDP-11 by then, so it had probably experienced the bulk of its sales. Many other companies had computers on the market as well. Not sure if Ahl is being hyperbolic, misremembering, or has some kind of qualifier in his mind that did not make it into the article, but this is not factual.

Graphical games

•  Done"Galaxy Rescue and Lunar Rescue by Taito" - I think this is the same game under two different names.
•  Done"and Destination Earth, a clone of Lunar Rescue." - This appears to be a bootleg rather than a clone and should therefore not be mentioned here.
•  DoneAccording to Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders, a version of the game called Moon Lander was one of the first three commercial computer games released in Britain. It was written for the MK14 computer kit. The system used an LED calculator display, so I don't think it was really a graphical game, but I put this here because this seems to be where all the other microcomputer ports are mentioned. Whether here or elsewhere, seems like a neat tidbit to mention in the article.
  • I don't really like the Mk14 version being relegated to the legacy section, as all the other versions of the game are listed elsewhere. Perhaps the graphical games section could be renamed "Graphical games and microcomputer ports" or something like that, which would allow the Mk14 version to live among all the other ports? Indrian (talk) 21:04, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
    • @Indrian: I'd rather keep the text-based games together, so I found a way to discuss it in that section (and left the "first 3 British home computer games" bit in the reception). --PresN 16:48, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

That about does it. Nothing too major in there, so I will put this nomination  On hold while changes are made. Indrian (talk) 16:30, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

@Indrian: Alright, took me a bit to get to this, but all issues addressed. --PresN 16:21, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

@PresN: Looking good. Just one more point to clear up, which I outlined above. Indrian (talk) 21:04, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

The Thanksgiving holiday interrupted things here for me, but I am now happy to promote after the recent tweaks to the lead. Well done! Indrian (talk) 15:09, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Rename of article

Is this not a video game genre than a series? There is no shared sense of development team or vision or anything. Just a shared concept at the centre. I would recommend renaming to Lunar Lander clone or Lunar Lander (video game genre) or something like that.--Coin945 (talk) 03:50, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, "Lunar Lander (video game genre)" maybe. You're right that it's not really a series, so "genre" might be closer. Let me think about it for a bit, and then maybe move it/adjust the lead to match. --PresN 04:33, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Well technically it's a subset of the Flight simulator genre of games, specifically Space flight simulations. It could be called a Landing simulator?--Coin945 (talk) 13:33, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

At that point we're just making up our own name, though, isntead of using its actual name. --PresN 13:39, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Ok, renamed to "Lunar Lander (video game genre)". --PresN 15:25, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

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Split proposal

It seems odd to me that Lunar Lander and Moonlander don't have their own separate pages outside of a general genre page. It'd be like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork only existing under a general "Adventure (video game genre)" page, or if the entries for Hamurabi or Pong were "genre" pages that listed all their respective clones.

I propose that Lunar Lander and Moonlander should be split out into their own pages, and then either the "genre" page is rewritten to be consistent with typical genre pages (a la Interactive fiction or Action-adventure game, or the clones are listed under a section within the respective Lunar Lander or Moonlander page. Xscapist (talk) 05:49, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

It's a bit of an odd page, though that's partially because it wasn't always (video game genre) but was (series) instead. The problem is that it's kind of a genre, but mostly just the same game being made over and over by different people on different platforms (first in text and then with graphics), but that's not really a "series" either. In any case, the problem with what you're proposing is a lack of sources- the arcade game has enough to be its own article, but Moonlander doesn't really. It was tried back in April 2021, actually, but it didn't make it beyond the two paragraphs that are already here, and that's not really enough content. In the end, most sources talk about "Lunar Landers" but not enough about any specific one to break it out of here. --PresN 16:11, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

If you'll humor me, I've taken the liberty of Sandboxing up an idea for a reorganization of the page as a dedicated "Lunar Lander (1969 video game)" page. (Note: Just pretend the first image is a screenshot of the 1969 game.) I think this is a little easier to grok, plus it gets rid of some repetition (a few paragraphs are repeated multiple times in the body of the current version). Also: I designed it so it could pretty easily be split out into two separate entries if anyone else agrees, since even split up, these two entries would still be longer and/or more substantial than existing entries for Lander games like Lunar Rescue, Jupiter Lander, and Psygnosis' Lander (video game). Xscapist (talk) 23:07, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

So, I think there's a few different problems with your mockup:

• It starts off saying that it's about a game called Lunar Lander (aka ROCKET, LUNAR or APOLLO), but the actual original 1969 Lunar Landing Game on its own was a tiny game that has essentially no sourcing or details- it existed, it was made by Storer, it got converted to BASIC and put in CC and 101 BASIC Computer Games. You pulled out of context the text that's just about that version, but 1 of your three paragraphs isn't really about that game but about Ahl's stuff that actually covers 2 other versions as well except you dropped the mention of them. And then half the lead is just repeating those 3 paragraphs in 2 paragraphs. To try to make it the subject on it's own, you've ended up divorcing it from what makes it notable: that it spawned an entire subgenre of very similar games over the next decade, almost all small hobby/freeware projects with a constellation of tweaks and additions. So, saying that the article is about that 1969 game only to dance around the fact that there's a whole set of similar games that were often considered variations on a theme, with the most popular contemporary references (Ahl's book and the PCC book) containing multiple variations of the concept is... disingenuous.
• And that's not to mention that the way you have it laid out, instead of "text games" and "graphical games" being subsections of the Lunar Lander concept as a whole, you instead have the text games as a subsection of the development of the original game, but then have Moonlander as a subsection of the original game and all the other graphical games as a subsection of Moonlander. You're ending up creating exactly the problem you were trying to solve: instead of an article about the "genre" or "concept" of a Lunar Lander game, which discusses the notable examples including the very first one in 1969 and the first graphical one in 1973, you now have an article purportedly about that 1969 game that spends about a quarter of its length talking about that game (and only gets there by using sources that are about the genre as a whole or the text-based subset as a whole as if they were just about the original game), and which then goes on to treat all the graphical versions of the game as a subset of Moonlander.
• Like, I get that what you want is to spin out Moonlander and Lunar Lander into their own articles, and I think that would be cool! I'm all for it! But the way to do that is to find more sources that discuss those games specifically, not rework everything so that dozens of other games are considered to be subsets of those two progenitors so that you can then cut the article in half. Most of those developers didn't set out to make their own versions of ROCKET or Moonlander, nor was that how their games were perceived, now or then: they set out to make their own "Lunar Lander game".
• Tl;dr: there aren't enough sources or content right now to split out either Moonlander or ROCKET into their own pages. The way to fix that is to find more sources and content so they can be pulled from here with a shorter summary left behind, not to force a perspective that dozens of other games were part of the development of those two. --PresN 20:09, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I think we have very different perceptions on why Storer's game is notable, and a few of the problems with my edit are problems carried over from the current article.

• In terms of amount of detail and sources, I don't think my proposed reorganization isn't much different from the entry on Star Trek (1971 video game) other than that Star Trek has a much longer section describing how the gameplay. The problem with the repeating paragraphs was carried over from the current article, which even has a paragraphs repeated and reworded across sections. I was tempted to cut the lead way down in my reorganization, but thought maybe that should be a separate discussion?
• To say that Storer's game is only notable because of the number of clones is like saying Pong or Adventure are only notable because of the number of clones. I don't think including tweaks of the original as a separate section is any more disingenuous that Super Star Trek having its own section in Star Trek (1971 video game) as a tweak, or Colossal Cave Adventure having a separate section for Wood's tweaks plus an additional section for tweaks by other authors. There's an established precedent for handling computer game articles this way. I think it's more disingenuous to say the text lunar landers *weren't* just tweaks of Storer's game, since it's very clear they were adding new features and building onto his existing game, not creating something new from scratch. Lunar landers as a genre are more like Pong clones as a genre, where other companies started adding new features that in some cases were more popular than the original.
• Additionally, just as there's currently no article dedicated to the genre of Pong clones, I'd question whether text lunar landers qualify for their own separate genre article outside of the original. With a genre like text adventures, people eventually moved on from tweaking the original Colossal Cave Adventure to creating original works, which didn't happen with text lunar landers unless you count graphical lunar landers, and I would argue those are as much a different genre as action-adventures are from text adventures. Graphical lunar lander clones were typically clones of Atari's Lunar Lander much more than Storer's game (except for Atari's own clone, which was a tweak of Moonlander in the same way that Pong was a tweak of Odyssey Tennis), similar to Pong clones or Invader clones. The Electronic Games magazine quote even supports this, likening graphical lunar landers to "Space Invaders imitators," another category much larger than lunar landers that doesn't have its own article. Xscapist (talk) 22:00, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

• And just to clarify about the opening line in my proposed reorganization: Storer's original was known as Lunar Lander Games (what Storer calls it on his homepage), ROCKET (in Ahl's original 101 BASIC and in the original high school listing), LUNAR (in Ahl's reprint), and APOLLO (in the DECUS archive). So that line wasn't referring to the variations, just the different names given to Storer's game. In Ahl's original version of 101 BASIC he calls out Storer as being the originator of the game. Xscapist (talk) 01:16, 16 January 2022 (UTC)