The original Boulder Dash, made by Peter Liepa and Chris Gray was an amazingly made game for its time. The most astonishing part was how much "physics" and ene

The original Boulder Dash, made by Peter Liepa and Chris Gray was an amazingly made game for its time. The most astonishing part was how much "physics" and enemies the game was able to animate at the same time, several screens of elements, rocks, diamonds and enemies, there was no apparent limits on the number of animated stuff, on a 8 bit machine running as low as 1Mhz that was impressive. The clever trick was the use of cellular automata. The next state of all cells (including badguys and lava) can be computed by looking at the 8 neighbors cells, a simple double buffer to avoid overwriting updates and voilà.