Lunar Lander | 1979 | Arcade Experience | Cabinet Simulation
3This is my attempt to recreate the experience of playing the game Lunar Lander the way it was released, in an arcade cabinet with very beautiful art and the game being displayed on a vector monitor.
ABOUT THIS GAME
Lunar Lander is a single-player arcade game in the Lunar Lander subgenre. It was developed by Atari, Inc. and released in August 1979. It was the most popular version to date of the "Lunar Lander" concept, surpassing the prior Moonlander (1973) and numerous text-based games, and most later iterations of the concept are based on this Atari version. The player controls a lunar landing module, viewed from the side, and attempts to land safely on the Moon. The player can rotate the module and burn fuel to fire a thruster, attempting to gently land on marked areas. The scenario resets after every successful landing or crash, with new terrain, until no fuel remains. Coins can be inserted at any time to buy more fuel. Lunar Lander sold 4,830 units, a moderate success, but was soon overtaken by the November 1979 Asteroids, and 300 Asteroids units were shipped in Lunar Lander-branded cabinets.
ABOUT VECTOR MONITORS
In a vector display, the image is composed of drawn lines rather than a grid of glowing pixels as in raster graphics. For this reason it is impossible to accurately present what a monitor of this type is like in real life, so my attempt was to simulate a recording of this type of monitor, where trails of bright lights remain on the screen for a while before disappearing, and glows are presented where there is a large concentration of light.
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