Apollo (Lunar Landing Game)
-
This program realistically simulates an Apollo moon landing using NASA figures. It begins with module at 0 seconds, 120 miles above the moon, carrying 16000 pounds of fuel, with a velocity of 2600 miles per hour. Upon radar checks of velocity, altitude, remaining fuel, and time each 10 seconds, you may decide upon fuel rate for next time interval. The object is to land safely on the moon.
Apollo download code: Z2B63MND9V
Apollo is probably the last significant computer game to come out of the 1960s, and the most famous. It was originally written by a high school student named James Storer during the fall of 1969, mere months after the real Apollo 11 mission. The game was written in FOCAL for the school's PDP-8. In January of 1970 his teacher submitted the game to DEC (the manufacturer of PDP-8 computers), where the game was distributed as part of their software catalogue under the title Lunar Landing Game (APOLLO). From there, DEC employee Eric Peters ported the game to BASIC under the name Rocket. Text-based derivatives would be commonplace on school computers and BASIC catalogues until the mid 1980s. I can personally attest some versions made their way onto school graphing calculators well into the 2010s.
Unlike King of Sumeria, the story doesn't stop there. In 1973 DEC hired a former employee to write a graphical version of the game to demonstrate the new DEC GT40 terminals for the PDP-11. Jack Burness's version was called Moonlander and featured a side profile and light pen control. Moonlander was the first video game with an easter egg - a hidden McDonalds restaurant on the moon - predating the credits in Adventure by seven years. In 1979, Atari even produced an arcade version called Lunar Lander, their first vector graphics game, although it was quickly overshadowed by Asteroids. The number of derivative games are legion: Jupiter Lander (HAL Laboratory/VIC-20, 1981), Gravitar (Atari/Arcade, 1982), Thrust (Jeremy Smith/BBC Micro, 1986), etc. The genre survives into the present day. Even on the Nintendo Switch platform, Funbox Media released Terra Lander I & II in 2021, Sabec released a clone titled Moon Lander in January, and Atari released Lunar Lander Beyond just last month.
This is a source port of the original 1969 FOCAL program. Jim Storer grew up and is now a professor of Computer Science, and he maintains a webpage on the Lunar Landing Game. As it happens he didn't learn that his game was one of the most influential in the history of computer games until journalists contacted him in 2009! If you're interested in understanding the rocket physics, this site may be of some help (I know it helped me!).
~Max