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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 l
by strenholme 6y ago
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.
- pmoriarty 6y agoLode Runner was incredibly addictive even without the level editor. 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.
- wang_li 6y agoCtrl-g man.
- whoopdedo 6y agoYou might not have known that was there without reading the manual. And you might not have had a manual to read if, well, you know.
- wang_li 6y agoI will not confirm or deny trying every key and every ctrl sequence on the keyboard as a standard first step on every game that I “got”. Egads, though. It's CTRL-E, not CTRL-G. No idea what I was thinking hours ago.
- mrspeaker 6y agoI think what made it so addictive was the weird AI. They felt unpredictable and odd - sometimes they'd get stuck, sometimes they'd surprise you and go the "wrong" way and end up cutting you off... I never figured out the logic to those lil' characters!
- NelsonMinar 6y agoThat 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.
- reaperducer 6y agothe first game with a built in level editor Pinball Construction Set pre-dates Lode Runner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set In the circles I traveled in, PCS was far more popular than Lode Runner.
- santoshalper 6y agoApparently PCS was very well received too, winning awards and having strong sales. Interesting that it has largely disappeared into the mists but Lode Runner is in the pantheon of great early video games. It reminds me a little of Wizardry vs. Ultima. They were the first two huge RPG franchises, but Wizardry has mostly vanished from the collective consciousness and Ultima had far more staying power.
- megameter 6y agoPCS disappearing when Lode Runner didn't can be explained simply: it played a bad pinball, and it was itself a kind of clone. The thing PCS did is just one step in a lineage of pinball simulation software, starting with the Atari "Video Pinball" games and progressing through to today's games from Zen(Pinball FX) and Farsight(Pinball Arcade), as well as open source solutions like Visual Pinball. The construction feature was really novel and I used it too as a kid, but it doesn't really exist as a "game design" - it's software first, kind of like flight simulators. Early flight sims aren't very well remembered, although they can have a retro aesthetic appeal. [0] Lode Runner, on the other hand, is still Lode Runner in all its forms. It isn't a simulation of anything - the game pieces have a concrete, Chess-like logic to them. It's hard to improve upon just by adding "stuff" as the 1994 version did. And the game is easy enough to clone that many people, myself included, played people's clones of it. [0] https://youtu.be/BEkDRa--YaY https://youtu.be/BEkDRa--YaY
- bitwize 6y ago> Early flight sims aren't very well remembered Are you kidding me? Everyone who was into computers back in the 80s remembers the chunky look of MFS/Sublogic Flight Simulator 1.0 through 4.0. When Chuck Yeager died, more than one Hackernews remarked of how they discovered him through Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer back in the day.
- bhauer 6y agoAgreed. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_and_His_Robot_Factory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_and_His_Robot_Factor...
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_Destruction_Set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_Destruction_Set This game was one of our favorites.
- ericbarrett 6y agoI spent hours and hours designing tracks in Racing Destruction Set as a kid. Gave me a life-long love of cars and physics too. In some ways it was the great-great-great-grandparent of Kerbal Space Program.
- stefs 6y agohttps://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/Checkerboard_Construction_Set https://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/Checkerboard_Construction...
- jnwatson 6y agoI have fond memories of spending hours making and testing new levels, and exchanging them with my friends.
- tempodox 6y agoI 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.