A crazy memory I have with this game is related to its successor, Championship Lode Runner (mentioned in the article). The original allowed you to jump to any level through its title screen, so you could skip hard levels, or play them in any order you want. The Championship game, however, had 50 levels that you could only play through in order, and only after you had beaten the prior level. As my brother and I got stuck in one of of the lower levels, this was very frustrating since we had no way of enjoying the higher, more advanced levels.
Somewhere along the line, we figured out that you could start the original game, go to the level-jumping screen, remove the 5 1/4" original floppy disc and replace it with the one for the Championship game, and then enter the level you wanted to play. The original gameplay would load the Championship level as if nothing was out of the ordinary! I only think this was possible because the two games shared so much code structure. It gave me an idea of how the memory vs disc model of the game was operating. But I don't think it would be easy to do today since switching the floppy discs was so instrumental to making it work. Maybe today you could do kernel dumps or swap the in-memory vs disk binaries, but we were just kids not advanced computer wizards. Hurray for analog hacks!
By using the trick we were able to enjoy all 50 of the Championship levels at our leisure.
In the Apple II game "Below The Root", was a side-scrolling RPG kind of like early Zelda games, and you could use the floppy drive to wall-hack.
Every time you walked from one screen to another, it would load the new screen from disk. If you removed the disk from the drive before walking to a new screen, it would grind the empty drive for a while, but eventually it would just use the old screen layout for the new screen but still "think" you were in the new tile.
So lets say you had 3 screens 1-2-3 and '2' has an obstacle but '1' does not. You could:
1) walk to the right hand edge of screen 1
2) remove the floppy
3) cross to screen 2 - this would appear to reset you to the left side of screen 1
4) put the floppy back in
5) walk to right side of the "fake" screen 1 and cross to the next screen again
6) presto - you're now on screen 3! Obstacle avoided!
And you could repeat step (3) multiple times to teleport across an arbitrary # of screens.
Floppies were magic for me as a kid. Somehow way cooler than an Atari 2600 cart. My uncle had some variant of the Apple II in his basement. One night while the adults were visiting, I was down there excitedly playing the various games (The Dark Crystal, Loderunner, and Olympic Decathlon are the ones that come immediately to mind). I'd take one game out of the driver, drop it on the desk, and insert the next game. By the end of the night there was a sloppy pile of floppies that had previously been individual sheathed in a nice 'rolodex'. My parents called down and when I tried to spend the time to clean up my mess they made it pretty clear I needed to be up there 'right now'. So I foolishly left the pile rather than face my parents' wrath. I'm sure my uncle was furious when he found the pile; those things were fragile and I had treated them like they were Duplo. The next time I was at my uncle's house I wasn't allowed to play. :(
For floppy swapping madness, Wasteland is the game that comes to mind for me. The game was split across two floppy disks, each covering roughly half of the map. When you'd enter a section that was on the other disk, the game would ask you to swap disks. The game state was saved on the disk on which the action occurred, so you could enter an unaltered world just by putting in a fresh copy of the game disk. This was useful for continuing to play after you'd beaten the game, as well as leveling up your characters to extreme levels and collecting multiple copies of rare or hard-to-get items.
Find a game disk that was a demo (like from a magazine). It must have a main ELF, that would then launch another ELF from the disk. (For example, the main menu would be one ELF, and then each demo game would be another elf). Create an iso, then replace one of the game ELFs with whatever executable you wanted. The resulting iso must have the same layout, with every file at the same location. Burn it to disk. Tear apart the PS2 and remove the top of the disk drive. There's a little white plastic piece with a magnet that clamps down the disk, remove that from the lid of the disk drive. Put the original disk in the drive, clamp down the disk with the magnet, and boot it up to the menu screen of the demo disk. Without hitting the eject button, use your finger to stop the drive, lift out the original disk, set in your burned one, put the magnet on top, and choose to run the game that corresponds to the ELF you replaced. Voila.
You reminded me of a similar bug we exploited for "Bards Tale 3" on the C64. Bards Tale had a character loader that would prompt you to insert your character disk to load characters from. It turns out that using other non Bards Tale disks (i.e. "Batman: The Movie") would yield corrupted characters, some with excess hit points or unusual items which could be given to your existing characters.
What made Lode Runner the must-have game to have is that it was the first game with a built in level editor. Before Lode Runner, once one finished all of the levels in a game, it was time to move on to another game. To make custom levels, one needed to program their own game in Basic.
With Lode Runner, one could open up the level editor, easily make a custom Lode level, then playtest and share it with friends.
That level editor was a thing of beauty. It inspired me to write my own level editors for other games. Ugly text based things that worked by editing the (cracked) game's data files. I learned so much doing that kind of thing.
I once had a VC20 or so and Lode Runner on loan for a holiday season and stumbled into that editor while trying out every key on the keyboard to see what it does. When I gave it back after the holidays my friend was flabbergasted he had a game with a level editor and didn't even know about it. That loan payed off in an unexpected way.
Agreed. If I recall correctly, around the same time, Electronic Arts was capturing some similar success by releasing several games with "Construction Set" in the name. Did Lode Runner inspire this?
A lesser known Lode Runner clone that I particularly enjoyed was "Mr. Robot and his Robot Factory," [1] though the Wikipedia page claims the gameplay was more similar to Miner 2049er. I think the addition of a level builder made it less like Miner and more like Lode Runner.
My brother and I were raised by a single mom. Getting our first computer (my first computer, as my brother wasn't interested) - a Commodore 64 - was a watershed moment. I couldn't believe it the day my mom got it and brought it home. This was when it's prices were getting slashed to prices should could kind of afford (approximately 1984-85). I pulled it out of the box after nearly breaking her neck with hugs and put it all together, hooking it up with to a massive, very pale and low contrast wooden cabinet color TV.
And then it dawned on me. I had no way to play any games! I actually needed a disk drive (something that nearly cost as much as the compute itself!). For the first couple of weeks, I entered lines of BASIC I either read in the manual or from the back of magazines.
When we finally got the drive, I could feel the surge of power! This would have been 9th grade - my last year of middle school where I went to school. I remember grousing about it during math class that I finally had all this gear and no money to buy the games for it. A guy ahead of me turned around and said he could bring me a stack of disks tomorrow.
We became solid best friends. That dude had a modem and was able to pull down "free" games from his telephone line all night long. It was the darkest, most seductive black magic I'd ever heard of.
I remember getting a copy of Top Gun before it was even available for retail. Crap game, but I thought it was something magical at the time.
The floppy disk was a life changer.
---
For what it's worth, Lode Runner was one of my favorite games as a kid. And it was one of the few my brother really liked, too. In fact, he was better at solving the puzzles than I was. I have multiple versions of the game for C64 to this very day, including a boxed cart.
I love Lode Runner. Great article - thanks for posting it.
All of what you've said applies to me as well. I found this particularly implementation a year or so ago. The nostalgia is great but it's still a genuinely fun game. I've probably only made it to level 8.
If you like Lode Runner, then you owe it to yourself to try N, which I consider to be its spiritual successor. Think Lode Runner but with deliciously smooth platforming physics. It's freeware and was a originally a Flash game from 2005, but has since also been made available (still free) for Win/Mac/Linux, as well as for consoles. Highly recommended. http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html
This is an old-school clone, written using the old ways (direct calls to Xlib for display). An SDL port exists if that tickles your fancy more.
(Note that game clones technically violate copyright, per Atari v. Philips and Tetris Holdings v. Xio, but the rightsholders to Lode Runner don't seem terribly interested in defending their IP against cloners.)
I loved both N and Lode Runner, but I would disagree that N is a spiritual successor. While it does follow the template of simple puzzle-platforming with emergent complexity and skill, the critical defining Lode Runner gimmick is missing.
"Still, none of this background would be remembered by anyone who actually played the game. Instead the supposed Bungeling guards would become popularly known as "mad
monks," which their pudgy low-resolution shapes rather resembled. Doubtless plenty of imaginative young gamers made up new narratives of their own to fit the bizarre image
of greedy monks chasing an intrepid adventurer up and down a maze of scaffolding dotted with gold."
As a kid, I didn't think of arcade games in terms of words, so the elaborate backgrounds and characters that game authors made up for their arcade games didn't matter, and I was rarely even aware of them.
I related to the games on an intuitive level, and just watching someone play without any words being exchanged or thought was enough for me to get it and play myself.
RPG's were different. There the actual background and characters mattered.
So much so that the first 6502 arcade game I wrote was a Lode Runner derivative called “The Heist”.
Levels consisted of floors and stair steps, and there were different types of art on the walls you could steal, including an easy one and a hard one (based on the location puzzle) of low and high value.
You could cut through floors and use ropes to rappel up or down. Some walkways were blocked by storage boxes you could push, including push into a hole in the floor which jammed and filled the hole.
Guards patrolled on beats. If close enough to you, they could shoot you. You could pick up a bucket of water from janitors, and slosh it on the floor to make the guard slide one way or another, or fall into a hole you’d cut.
You could “turn out the lights” at a light switch. The effect would be you could only see within a certain radius. Gaurds couldn’t see you any more, but also, you couldn’t see them unless close enough.
Most logic was AppleSoft Basic, while the drawing routines were 6502 so falling and sliding and throwing the water would be smooth.
Lode Runner got me into coaxing machines to do what I imagined, instead of just using what others did.
Wow, that brings back a lot of memories! Waiting for the dilating camera aperature to open at the beginning of each level. The digging and falling sounds. The reflexes needed to move, drill, and trap the bad guys. This was definitely a classic.
I grew up on Sierra's version of Lode Runner. As I read this series of game history, it's a reflective process of realizing that my own childhood experiences with computers were part of a cultural moment shaping several generations. As a CS education researcher, I sometimes have conversations trying to balance my sense that these simpler games offer rich learning opportunities to beginners with the recognition that my nostalgia for a time and place doesn't transfer to much value for the next generation. That said, has anyone seen modern re-implementations of Lode Runner or its kin, perhaps in Python, which would be suitable for analyzing program structure/hacking/teaching the basics of state-based AI?
I know of KGoldrunner. That looks to be around 10,000 lines of C++. I have no idea how approachable the code base is, but it’s definitely smaller than I expected, which is promising.
Way too much time spent on this game. I think it might have been the first video game I spent a considerable amount of time on. Monochromatic Apple II with a box joystick which was bent out of shape.... still great to play with though. Great game for the era.
What a coincidence, currently replaying Lode Runner: The Legend Returns. I am too young to have played the original in its time and have nostalgia for it, so I kindly disagree with the author and find The Legend Returns far more enjoyable.
Lode Runner was huge in our house on the C64, but I think Jumpman[1] and Fort Apocalypse[2] were played a lot more. We even caught our parents having 2am marathon sessions with Jumpman, which was not normal.
Same here. Two other huge games for me were H.E.R.O. [1] and Dropzone [2] (the latter a re-imagining of Defender), both of which have a lot in common with Fort Apocalypse.
Both are still extremely playable. Dropzone in particular has some great graphics for its time. It was made by Archer Maclean, who's more known for International Karate/International Karate+, which I also played incessantly as a kid.
Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, and Pitfall 2 also come to mind as examples of classic early platformers.
> At the start of the pandemic, a friend gave me all of his old Atari 2600 carts. A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to trying Miniature Golf. The graphics are terrible by any post-1982 standard, and the hand-drawn screenshots in the paper catalogs of yesteryear made it look worse, so hardly anyone bought it. But it's actually a pretty good game. You can sit down with and play for several hours while relaxing, instead of gnashing your teeth and swearing at other players.
loderunner is a game my mother really loves, however, while playing this game, it is the only time I've heard my mother swear...a lot! as well as jump up and down in frustration and rage quit. But she always went back and played it.
Lode Runner is definitely one of my favorites of all time. But the favorite, which I genuinely believe is the best game of all time and I've been playing games over a four decade at this point, is Hollow Knight.
I loved this game. I first played a ported version of Lode Runner on a sinclair spectrum clone in the 80s, I was less than 10 years old. I love The digita antiquarian, he brings back sweet memories
I remember playing Lode Runner The Legend Returns as a kid. My parents had a Mac Performa 6200 sitting around gathering dust, so I would mess around with it when I wasn't playing NES. The thing is still sitting around, but doesn't boot. Even took the time to replace the PRAM battery with the custom part that takes AAA batteries :(
Lode Runner was one of my very first game on Commodore 64, although not my favorite. I was in primary school. A schoolmate gave me a tape with a few games on it, including "lode runner". Every week we would get new original games. There was a lot of creativity on these constrained 8-bit computers.
I'd be at school, creating levels on graph paper and playing them in my head. Then at home, with the level editor test them out. Some levels really took an hour to play.
This was on a C64 with a digital joystick, which I found more playable than on an Apple II with an analog joystick.
[+] [-] hcrisp|5 years ago|reply
Somewhere along the line, we figured out that you could start the original game, go to the level-jumping screen, remove the 5 1/4" original floppy disc and replace it with the one for the Championship game, and then enter the level you wanted to play. The original gameplay would load the Championship level as if nothing was out of the ordinary! I only think this was possible because the two games shared so much code structure. It gave me an idea of how the memory vs disc model of the game was operating. But I don't think it would be easy to do today since switching the floppy discs was so instrumental to making it work. Maybe today you could do kernel dumps or swap the in-memory vs disk binaries, but we were just kids not advanced computer wizards. Hurray for analog hacks!
By using the trick we were able to enjoy all 50 of the Championship levels at our leisure.
[+] [-] variaga|5 years ago|reply
Every time you walked from one screen to another, it would load the new screen from disk. If you removed the disk from the drive before walking to a new screen, it would grind the empty drive for a while, but eventually it would just use the old screen layout for the new screen but still "think" you were in the new tile.
So lets say you had 3 screens 1-2-3 and '2' has an obstacle but '1' does not. You could:
1) walk to the right hand edge of screen 1
2) remove the floppy
3) cross to screen 2 - this would appear to reset you to the left side of screen 1
4) put the floppy back in
5) walk to right side of the "fake" screen 1 and cross to the next screen again
6) presto - you're now on screen 3! Obstacle avoided!
And you could repeat step (3) multiple times to teleport across an arbitrary # of screens.
8 y.o. me was super proud to figure that out :)
[+] [-] cgriswald|5 years ago|reply
For floppy swapping madness, Wasteland is the game that comes to mind for me. The game was split across two floppy disks, each covering roughly half of the map. When you'd enter a section that was on the other disk, the game would ask you to swap disks. The game state was saved on the disk on which the action occurred, so you could enter an unaltered world just by putting in a fresh copy of the game disk. This was useful for continuing to play after you'd beaten the game, as well as leveling up your characters to extreme levels and collecting multiple copies of rare or hard-to-get items.
[+] [-] tsomctl|5 years ago|reply
Find a game disk that was a demo (like from a magazine). It must have a main ELF, that would then launch another ELF from the disk. (For example, the main menu would be one ELF, and then each demo game would be another elf). Create an iso, then replace one of the game ELFs with whatever executable you wanted. The resulting iso must have the same layout, with every file at the same location. Burn it to disk. Tear apart the PS2 and remove the top of the disk drive. There's a little white plastic piece with a magnet that clamps down the disk, remove that from the lid of the disk drive. Put the original disk in the drive, clamp down the disk with the magnet, and boot it up to the menu screen of the demo disk. Without hitting the eject button, use your finger to stop the drive, lift out the original disk, set in your burned one, put the magnet on top, and choose to run the game that corresponds to the ELF you replaced. Voila.
[+] [-] Rodeoclash|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nevster|5 years ago|reply
It was the first game I got with my Apple //c. Had never even played the original.
[+] [-] strenholme|5 years ago|reply
With Lode Runner, one could open up the level editor, easily make a custom Lode level, then playtest and share it with friends.
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
Pinball Construction Set pre-dates Lode Runner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set
In the circles I traveled in, PCS was far more popular than Lode Runner.
[+] [-] pmoriarty|5 years ago|reply
I greatly enjoyed the game when it came out, but didn't even know it had a level editor until you mentioned it right now.
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempodox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhauer|5 years ago|reply
A lesser known Lode Runner clone that I particularly enjoyed was "Mr. Robot and his Robot Factory," [1] though the Wikipedia page claims the gameplay was more similar to Miner 2049er. I think the addition of a level builder made it less like Miner and more like Lode Runner.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_and_His_Robot_Factor...
[+] [-] jnwatson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erickhill|5 years ago|reply
And then it dawned on me. I had no way to play any games! I actually needed a disk drive (something that nearly cost as much as the compute itself!). For the first couple of weeks, I entered lines of BASIC I either read in the manual or from the back of magazines.
When we finally got the drive, I could feel the surge of power! This would have been 9th grade - my last year of middle school where I went to school. I remember grousing about it during math class that I finally had all this gear and no money to buy the games for it. A guy ahead of me turned around and said he could bring me a stack of disks tomorrow.
We became solid best friends. That dude had a modem and was able to pull down "free" games from his telephone line all night long. It was the darkest, most seductive black magic I'd ever heard of.
I remember getting a copy of Top Gun before it was even available for retail. Crap game, but I thought it was something magical at the time.
The floppy disk was a life changer.
---
For what it's worth, Lode Runner was one of my favorite games as a kid. And it was one of the few my brother really liked, too. In fact, he was better at solving the puzzles than I was. I have multiple versions of the game for C64 to this very day, including a boxed cart.
I love Lode Runner. Great article - thanks for posting it.
[+] [-] linknoid|5 years ago|reply
Even though I'm a lot better than when I was a kid, I've only made it up to level 14 so far.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] superkuh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefgeek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|5 years ago|reply
This is an old-school clone, written using the old ways (direct calls to Xlib for display). An SDL port exists if that tickles your fancy more.
(Note that game clones technically violate copyright, per Atari v. Philips and Tetris Holdings v. Xio, but the rightsholders to Lode Runner don't seem terribly interested in defending their IP against cloners.)
[+] [-] Pxtl|5 years ago|reply
There's no digging in N.
[+] [-] bane|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tromp|5 years ago|reply
“Nv2-Mac” will damage your computer. You should move it to the Trash.
[+] [-] pmoriarty|5 years ago|reply
As a kid, I didn't think of arcade games in terms of words, so the elaborate backgrounds and characters that game authors made up for their arcade games didn't matter, and I was rarely even aware of them.
I related to the games on an intuitive level, and just watching someone play without any words being exchanged or thought was enough for me to get it and play myself.
RPG's were different. There the actual background and characters mattered.
[+] [-] Terretta|5 years ago|reply
So much so that the first 6502 arcade game I wrote was a Lode Runner derivative called “The Heist”.
Levels consisted of floors and stair steps, and there were different types of art on the walls you could steal, including an easy one and a hard one (based on the location puzzle) of low and high value.
You could cut through floors and use ropes to rappel up or down. Some walkways were blocked by storage boxes you could push, including push into a hole in the floor which jammed and filled the hole.
Guards patrolled on beats. If close enough to you, they could shoot you. You could pick up a bucket of water from janitors, and slosh it on the floor to make the guard slide one way or another, or fall into a hole you’d cut.
You could “turn out the lights” at a light switch. The effect would be you could only see within a certain radius. Gaurds couldn’t see you any more, but also, you couldn’t see them unless close enough.
Most logic was AppleSoft Basic, while the drawing routines were 6502 so falling and sliding and throwing the water would be smooth.
Lode Runner got me into coaxing machines to do what I imagined, instead of just using what others did.
[+] [-] bokchoi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ur-whale|5 years ago|reply
Just reading the name triggered the SFX in my head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72k1ZYp83tc
[+] [-] js2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hcrisp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cproctor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismorgan|5 years ago|reply
(Its README at https://invent.kde.org/games/kgoldrunneror https://github.com/KDE/kgoldrunner is over a decade out of date, but it looks like the actual code is still being maintained so it compiles, though it may not be getting new development.)
[+] [-] boringg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tarsinge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fireattack|5 years ago|reply
I played countless hours of that with my friends and parents. Good times.
[+] [-] cronix|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrsZ1bDy4Dg
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1A-BNafyDk
[+] [-] atombender|5 years ago|reply
Both are still extremely playable. Dropzone in particular has some great graphics for its time. It was made by Archer Maclean, who's more known for International Karate/International Karate+, which I also played incessantly as a kid.
Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, and Pitfall 2 also come to mind as examples of classic early platformers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpzN0fagzi8
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSJ5Iuv-0gU
> At the start of the pandemic, a friend gave me all of his old Atari 2600 carts. A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to trying Miniature Golf. The graphics are terrible by any post-1982 standard, and the hand-drawn screenshots in the paper catalogs of yesteryear made it look worse, so hardly anyone bought it. But it's actually a pretty good game. You can sit down with and play for several hours while relaxing, instead of gnashing your teeth and swearing at other players.
[+] [-] Osiris|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kim_Bruning|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|5 years ago|reply
The game had arcade versions too (MAME roms). They’re quite fun and have aged much better than a lot of games.
I found this on the quarter taking version.
https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8441
[+] [-] keithnz|5 years ago|reply
this web game is a pretty good recreation of the game http://loderunnerwebgame.com/game/
[+] [-] tempodox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drivebycomment|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tartoran|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MikeWazowski|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yodsanklai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjettter|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mypalmike|5 years ago|reply
As an aside, those Apple 2 analog joysticks were truly awful.