Video Games: The People, Games, and Companies

Fascinated by the theory underlying those communications, Storer had his father explain physical laws in action and the mathematical equations used to represent them, and he envisioned recreating that thrilling descent as a game. Jim attended Lexington Junior High School in the autumn of 1969, a few months after the Eagle landed, and had access to the school's computer systems.

   Storer: “Lexington High School had a PDP-8. It had 8 Teletypes, a small hard drive, and 12KB of main memory, where 8KB was used by the system and 4KB time shared by the users.”

   FOCAL could be used to program the school's minicomputer, which was powered by a sophisticated IBM-branded Card Sorter (the Type 83, capable of organizing and loading up to 1,000 punched cards per minute, generating a characteristic sound of moving mechanisms and rustling of the cardboard cards).

   Jim Storer programmed his game using this programming language. Keeping in mind the communications between the astronauts and the Command Centre, Storer decided to focus the gameplay on four key variables: the spacecraft's altitude, its vertical speed (positive meant the module was descending, and negative meant it was ascending), available fuel, and, of course, time. The system's output was limited to paper via teletypewriters, which were incapable of printing graphics. Therefore, Jim's game consisted solely of text: on each turn (simulating ten seconds), the player had to determine how much fuel to add to the engines by entering a number (ranging from 8 to 200). The program would calculate the amount of fuel used, the change in vertical velocity, and the lunar module's new altitude at the commencement of the next turn.

   The objective of the game was to contact the lunar surface while maintaining a safe velocity. At zero altitude, the program checked the instantaneous velocity and, based on the value assumed at the time of ground contact, the player received the outcome of the landing: within ten miles per hour, the landing was considered very good; with a velocity between 25 and 60 miles per hour, the player was warned that the impact had been very hard, not fatal to the crew, but that the vehicle was severely damaged; and above 60 miles per hour, the player was warned that the impact had been very hard, not fatal to the crew but damaging to the vehicle itself (ending the message with a laconic "good luck! "). If the impact speed was greater than 60 mph, the outcome was such a catastrophe as to "create a new lunar crater."

   After completing the writing and testing of the game, which was extremely intricate and difficult to comprehend due to the language used, Storer saved the program and made it available to the entire school under the name Rocket. The computer science instructor, Walter Koetke, admired Storer's work and recommended he submit the program directly to DEC. Koetke shipped the program on behalf of Storer (after securing Storer's agreement) and presented it as a FOCAL Lunar Landing Simulation (APOLLO).

 The previously-mentioned DEC internal newsletter had been published in some form since 1962. DECUSCOPE, originally titled Information for Digital Equipment Computer Consumers, was distributed to all of DEC's customers. The purpose of the newsletter (later renamed DECUS) was to provide DEC system users with a listing of ready-made programs to use or study in order to learn programming, and to demonstrate the potential of PDP minicomputers by demonstrating what an experienced programmer could accomplish with just a few lines of well-written code.

   DEC received Storer's program on January 20, 1970, and included in the FOCAL8-81 edition with a 40-line listing and a brief description: “This program realistically simuates 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 the next time interval. The object is to land safely on the moon.” 

   Rocket, or Lunar Landing, was a rapid success that, due to the newsletter, spread like wildfire wherever DEC systems were available, as had previously occurred with other games and would occur in the future. Inspired by Storer's intuition, numerous students and programmers analyzed the code and modified it to enhance it. Thus, custom versions of Storer's game flourished, with modifications to the mathematical formulas or the introduction of new variables, such as Apollo II by David A. Moon of Wayland High School, in which the player must contend with small random errors in instrumental readings in addition to horizontal and vertical displacement.

When the game was converted to Basic, its popularity skyrocketed because it could now be run and played extensively on computer systems other than the DEC systems for which it was originally designed. The more the game spread to various systems, the larger the audience it attracted, allowing aspiring programmers to experiment with creating innumerable variations on the theme. Students and seasoned programmers alike were attracted to Storer's game by its pure brilliance, and many used it as a starting point to create a customized version or something entirely new.

   Among the many individuals who knew Rocket, David H. Ahl, whose name has already been mentioned, is undoubtedly one of the most prominent. Ahl was impressed by the popularity of Storer's game, to the extent that he wrote: "this game in its many different versions and names (ROCKET, LUNAR, LEM and APOLLO) is by far and away the single most popular computer game." He decided to include it from the very first version of his book Basic Computer games, in 1973, under the name ROCKET and the title "Land an Apollo Capsule on the Moon," along with two of the many derivative versions: one written by Eric Peters, Maynard's DEC employee, and one by William Labaree II of Alexandria.

   A humorous aspect of the Ahl-published Basic version of Rocket is that the game is introduced differently than in the original. In the original version of Storer's game, the user was given a brief, terse explanation of the game's context: "Control calling lunar module. Manual control is necessary." In his version, Ahl turned the tables and took every opportunity to make a sly joke about DEC’s competitors’ computers: "The on-board computer has failed (it wasn't made by Digital) so you have to land the capsule manually." In later versions of his book, Ahl's joke changed again and took on another target ("It was made by Xerox"). This was at least partly due to  the fact that, between editions of the book, there had been a nasty breakup between Ahl and DEC.

   Rocket was not the only game created at Lexington High School, nor the only one created there that was later included in Ahl's book. In 1968, three of Storer's contemporaries—Larry Cram, Luther Goodie, and Doug Hibbard—created a lengthy and intricate war simulation game titled Civil War. It presented the player with the challenge of completing a lengthy campaign, which consisted of fourteen of the most famous and significant Civil War battles. Players were presented with two categories of resources: men and money; the player (or general) was required to choose an offensive or defensive strategy from a short list. The program would then proceed to calculate the outcome of the battle, factoring in morale (depending on the amount of money spent), the number of men engaged in the action, and the strategy that had historically proven most effective for the battle. It would then report losses in the form of casualties and deserters, before proceeding to the next battle. Civil War, unlike Storer's game, was written natively in Basic, so Ahl did not need to modify it for publication in his book.

Rocket gained even more popularity as a result of Ahl's book, eventually making its way into hobbyist circles and then into the homes of early microcomputer buyers. Before arriving in the RAM of Trinity's computers, Rocket's code went through two crucial phases. While Ahl was publishing the first edition of his book, DEC was using Storer's creation for commercial and demonstration purposes.

   In 1973, the company had just released the GT40, a vector graphics terminal with genuinely revolutionary technical specifications. The GT40, which sold for less than $11,000 (equivalent to $66,000 in 2021 dollars), was more than just a terminal with advanced graphics; it could also be used as a standalone computer and featured an optical stylus as an input device.

   Consistent with DEC's policy, the GT40 required software to demonstrate the true potential of the otherwise prohibitively expensive machine, and so it was decided to reuse the concept created by Storer and the gameplay of Apollo II to create a game that would take advantage of vector graphics and the terminal's full potential. Jack Burness programmed the program under the name Moonlander. Using the light pen, the player had to modify engine power and rotate the spacecraft left and right (directing the light beam to the appropriate arrows) to apply the correct thrust vector. Burness determined that, to complicate the player's life and take advantage of the terminal's graphical capabilities, the lunar terrain should not be consistently flat, but should instead contain hills and dangerous, sharp mountains where it was impossible to land and which blocked the lander's path. Not content with that, Burness also included one of the first easter eggs: if the player directed the module far enough away, to an area not initially displayed on the screen, it could land near a "MacDonald's" or even crash into the restaurant receiving a final taunt from the game: "You just destroyed the only MacDonald's on the Moon."

   As was the case with Spacewar!, Moonlander began to spread rapidly, albeit with the apparent limitation of a GT40 terminal's availability. It did not take long for the planted seed to yield fruit.

   In the latter half of the 1970s, Atari began investigating the use of a vector monitor, a device in which the image was rendered with lines rather than individual dots. As usual, the mission was delegated to Cyan Engineering, an Atari subsidiary. As the development of the apparatus progressed, Atari's engineers began to ponder the potential applications of the new technology.

   One of the recently recruited Cyan engineers had had direct contact with Moonlander in college. His name was Howard Delman, and his story aptly illustrates how the video game experience frequently served as a formative influence on later generations of game designers.

   The commercial success of the Atari-developed arcade version of Storer's game was limited, in part because, shortly after the release of Lunar Lander, Atari made available to arcades a second game built with the same technology and which, in addition to its science fiction theme, shared some of the code with Delman and Moore's game. It was a meteorite.

   The success of the new arcade ended up overshadowing Delman and Moore's product to the extent that Atari's first Asteroids cabinets were constructed by reusing the already painted Lunar Lander cabinets and thus featured the landing game's graphics. Numerous variants of Rocket were programmed and sold for Trinity's microcomputers and subsequent platforms after Lunar Lander was discontinued in favour of its more successful sister title. Some of these were text-only and inspired by Storer's work, while others, with their more complex graphics and gameplay, were derivatives of Lunar Lander or Moonlander. Lunar Lander for Atari 400/800 was published by Adventure International, a corporation founded in 1979 by Mr. and Mrs. Alexis and Scott Adams with the goal of publishing Scott's text adventures, as the company's name indicates.

   As was common in the early 1980s, Rocket's gameplay was so basic and intriguing that it lent itself to endless variations, which was made possible by the fact that Atari itself, when it tried to patent Lunar Lander, ran up against the fact that Moonlander constituted such a cumbersome precedent that no company could appropriate the gameplay and prevent competitors from creating anything similar or derivative. For this reason, games with inertial physics, gravitational attraction, and gameplay centred on mastering physical laws continued to be produced for several years on virtually every available hardware platform, using progressively more accessible technologies.

   In 1982, Atari attempted to reintroduce this gameplay with Gravitar, a full-colour vector graphics game in which the player must not only juggle inertia and gravity, but also shoot enemy bunkers, activate the tractor beam to refuel, and, in more difficult levels, juggle an inverted gravity, which brings the ship up the screen. Mastertronic programmed a very similar game titled 1985: The Day After for the C64, capitalizing on the popularity of the TV movie about a hypothetical thermonuclear conflict that had been published only a year earlier. However, the game's gameplay had nothing to do with the movie product.

   The trade press of the early 1980s, bewildered by the number of clones and derivatives, failed to comprehend the peculiarities of the line of games spawned by Storer's school program. In 1981, Electronic Games magazine, for instance, criticized the game as "yet another entry in a field as crowded as the category of Space Invaders clones." It sometimes appears that every company capable of duplicating a cassette is attempting to sell a game on this premise.

   The actuality was quite dissimilar. All Rocket games strictly adhered to Newtonian laws, transforming them into simulations of varying degrees of sophistication. Possessing a strong didactic capacity that was neither expressed nor understood at the time, these simulations had the potential to confront any user, from the youngest to the oldest, with abstract and complex concepts such as inertia and acceleration, rendering them simple and manageable with the fingers of the hand that gripped the controller and the buttons that were pressed to fuel the engines.

   Nonetheless, the objective may have been too abstract for a portion of the audience, who were accustomed to simpler and more immediate games with concrete objectives, such as shooting the enemy tank, completing a circuit of the track, and bouncing a ball off a brick wall. Nonetheless, the path was paved: the technology developed for Lunar Lander would be utilized in future games with greater success.

   It was merely a question of time.