Moonlander flash game

Moon Lander or Lunar Lander is the name of several video games. In all variations of the game, the player must portion a limited amount of fuel to land on the moon without crashing. Computer Gaming World described it as one of the first fun programs neophyte programmers start with and continually improve upon as they improve their skills.

Various flash versions of Moon lander

The history of Moonlander

Moon Lander or Lunar Lander is an early computer game that runs on the DEC GT40 graphics terminal (typically downloaded from a PDP-10 mainframe computer). DEC commissioned the game to be written in 1973 as a demonstration of the capabilities of the GT40; it was seen at many trade shows.

The goal was to correctly land a lunar module on the surface of the moon using the game's telemetry data. If the player miscalculates the module's landing, the module will either fly off into space or crash hard against the moon's surface or the mountain over which the lander first passed. The interface was through a light pen and the output display was a vector graphics system; the light pen allowed adjusting the throttle value and the angle of the lunar lander. Sophisticated players could achieve a landing on the mountain while cheaters learned the address of the word of magnetic core memory in which the fuel value was stored.

Later versions offered the ability to run the game on a free-standing RT-11 system as well as an Easter egg: a specific landing site offered a McDonald's restaurant. Upon landing successfully near the restaurant, an astronaut would walk over to get lunch. Crashing into the restaurant destroyed it permanently (until the program was reloaded) and displayed an amusingly sarcastic message berating the player.

About moonlander.eu

Moonlander.eu is a waste of time project of Webparking. A Dutch webdevelopment en webhosting provider.
Why? Just because moonlander beats most modern games when it comes to the amount of times we've played it. Could be because there weren't as much games back then but whatever, Moonlander rules. ;)