Lode Runner
Lode Runner is a puzzle-platform game developed by Doug Smith and published by Broderbund in 1983. Its gameplay mechanics are similar to Space Panic from 1980. The player controls a character who must collect all the gold pieces in a level and reach the end while being chased by a number of enemies. It is one of the first games to include a level editor.
After the original game, a number of remakes, spinoffs, and sequels were published in the Lode Runner series for different computers and consoles by different developers and publishers. Tozai Games holds the copyright and trademark rights.
Gameplay
The player controls a stick figure who must collect all the gold in a level while avoiding the guards. After collecting all the gold, the player must reach the top of the screen to advance to the next level. There are 150 levels in total, which progressively challenge players' problem-solving abilities or reaction times.Levels have a multi-story, brick platform motif, with ladders and suspended hand-to-hand bars that offer multiple ways to travel. Guards can pick up gold bars by running over them, but any individual guard cannot carry more than one bar at a time. The player can dig holes into floors to temporarily trap guards and may safely walk over them. If a guard is carrying a bar of gold when he falls into a hole, he will drop it and the player can then pick it up. Holes dug by the player fill in after a short delay. A trapped guard who cannot escape a hole before it fills is consumed and immediately respawns in a random location at the top of the level. Unlike guards, the player's character may not climb out of a hole, and will be killed if it fills before he can escape. Floors may contain trapdoors, through which the player and guards will fall, and bedrock, through which the player cannot dig.
The player can dig a hole only on adjacent sides and may not dig directly beneath. In order to dig through multiple layers of bricks, the player must create a gap whose width is at least equal to the number of layers. However, exceptions to this rule arise when the player digs from the position of standing on a ladder, or hanging from a hand-to-hand bar, which makes it possible to repeatedly dig and descend one row. This kind of digging is involved in solving many of the levels.
The player starts with five lives; each level completion awards an extra life. If a guard catches the player, one life is subtracted, and the current level restarts. The player's character can fall from arbitrary heights without any injury, but cannot jump. The player can also trap themselves in pits from which the only escape is to abort the level, costing a life.
Enemy AI
The guards do not always take the shortest path to the player and can move in counterintuitive ways. For example, when the player and a guard are on the same ladder, the guard will sometimes move away. In general, depending on their exact positioning relative to Lode Runner, the guards sometimes appear to be repelled. Mastering the game involves developing the intuition to predict the movement of the guards.Permitted contact
The player may come into contact with a guard directly from above, where the stick figure's feet touches the guard's head. This is what enables the player to walk over guards that are temporarily stuck in a hole which has been dug. It is also possible to make this contact while both the guard and the player are falling. This is because the player not only runs faster, but also falls faster. Moreover, it is possible to survive the feet-to-head contact while a guard is standing on a platform and begins to move. Both forms of contact are necessary to solve some levels. It is sometimes necessary to liberate a trapped guard by digging while standing on his head, but then moving rapidly in the opposite direction when the guard begins marching to freedom. In a few levels, it is necessary to use a falling guard as a bridge to reach an otherwise unreachable area. One subtlety is that if a down movement is initiated while standing on a guard's head, or briefly touching the guard's head during free fall, the consequences are fatal.Trapping and using guards
In some levels, guards can be deliberately trapped in various ways. For instance, they can be lured into entering a part of the level from which there is no escape. In some situations, the player can liberate trapped guards by digging them out. In some levels, the player must exploit the guards by letting them collect gold pieces which are positioned such that whoever collects them will become trapped. When the guard collects the gold and becomes trapped, the player can release the guard and then later steal the gold after it has been dropped.In some levels, there are gold pieces that can only be collected by digging holes to trap and kill the guards. Deceased guards come back to life from locations near the top of the screen, which may allow them to reach parts of the level that cannot be reached by the player.
Traversal orders
Some levels require careful ordering of traversal, because they are divided into zones connected by passages which are impossible to navigate in the reverse direction. If a gold piece remains in an unreachable zone, the player may have to abort the level, unless there is a way to coax a guard into bringing the gold.Timing
Some puzzles in the advanced levels are time-sensitive. The player must dig in order to penetrate the interior of some cavern to collect gold, and quickly return the same way before the digging repairs itself. Other puzzles require deliberate timing among the digging actions because the player must run over previously dug-out tiles that have just repaired themselves, while having enough time to pass through ones which have not yet repaired.Development
Around late 1980, high school student James Bratsanos heard from a friend about a new arcade video game, Space Panic by Universal, that involves climbing platforms and ladders while digging holes to trap monsters. Bratsanos was intrigued by his friend's description of the concept, and he wanted to develop it further. He began writing a Commodore PET program, called Suicide, using simple text-based graphics. Due to his lack of programming experience, there were no pre-programmed levels, but he instead built "an engine that could interpret a game level and then run a processing loop on the monsters". This novel design later evolved into the concept of a level editor.At the University of Washington in 1981, Bratsanos met two other students, architecture student Douglas E. Smith and Tracy Steinbeck. Following the release of Nintendo's arcade platformer Donkey Kong that year, the three students began working on a program called Kong, which evolved the concepts of Suicide. Bratsanos later left the project to pursue his studies, and Smith continued to develop Kong into the prototype of what later became Lode Runner. Kong was written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer limited to one building on the UW campus. Kong was soon ported to VAX minicomputers, which had more terminals available on campus. The game was programmed in Fortran using ASCII character graphics. When Kong was ported to the VAX, some Pascal sections were mixed into the original Fortran code.
Over one weekend in 1982, Smith recreated a crude, playable version in 6502 assembly language on an Apple II Plus and renamed the game Miner. Through the end of the year, he refined that version, which was black-and-white with no joystick support. He submitted a rough version to Broderbund around October 1982 and received a one-line rejection letter which said "Thank you for submitting your game concept. Unfortunately, it does not fit within our product line." Smith borrowed money to purchase a color monitor and joystick and continued to improve the game. Around Christmas of 1982, he submitted the game once more, now renamed Lode Runner, to four publishers and received offers from all four: Sierra, Sirius, Synergistic, and Broderbund. He took the deal with Broderbund.
Like its text-based Kong predecessors, the submitted game had only simple animation where characters move across the screen in block increments. It was too primitive for an acceptable commercial product as Broderbund wanted detailed pixel-level movement. Smith was given a $10,000 advance by Broderbund to develop the inter-square animation and to provide 150 levels of play.
Smith's new game would be one of the first to include a level editor for user-generated content, allowing players to create levels for the game. In a 2010 interview, game designer John Romero claimed Smith added the level-editing function at the request of neighborhood kids that were playtesters, and "a ton" of the levels they designed ended up in the final game.
Release and ports
Lode Runner was originally released on June 23, 1983. The original microcomputer versions were for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and IBM PC compatibles. The VIC-20 version was released on cartridge, including the level editor. The Commodore 64 had both a disk and cartridge release, with the latter having 32 levels. The IBM PC port was originally on a self-booting disk and is incompatible with video cards other than CGA. A 1986 MS-DOS release runs on any video card.The Famicom version was released by Hudson Soft in 1984 and became one of the earliest third-party games made for that system. It has 50 levels, scrolling screens, added music, and graphics redone in a more cartoon-like style. In addition, fruits and vegetables randomly appear which may be picked up for additional points. A level editor was included, which in Japan used the Famicom's Family BASIC tape drive to save one's work. However, as with many US localizations, the NES lacked the tape drive, making it impossible to save levels created on the US release.
An arcade version of Lode Runner was produced by Irem in 1984. It was notably the first time an American computer game was adapted into a Japanese arcade game. It had some added features like the ability to hang off the ends of ladders and improved enemy AI.
A port for the Macintosh 128K followed in January 1985; it runs on machines up to OS 6 and can be used on System 7 with a patch. Other versions include those for the Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, a licensed version for MSX published by ASCII Corporation, SG-1000, Windows 3.1x, and Game Boy.
Broderbund released an enhanced version, Championship Lode Runner, in 1985, with 50 levels and a higher difficulty. The company offered a commemorative certificate to anyone who could submit proof of having beaten the game. It was ported to the Apple, Atari, C64, MSX, and IBM PC, as well as the NES.
The Atari 8-bit version of Lode Runner was converted to cartridge and re-released by Atari Corporation in 1987, as one of the series of releases for the Atari XEGS console. This version contains all 150 levels and the level editor, which requires a disk drive.