Flutterby™! : Day 5: Lode Runner

Influential Video Games, Day 5: Lode Runner

When it comes to games with built-in level design, everyone points to the brilliance that was Pinball Construction Set. Bill Budge did, indeed, squeeze just about everything out of the 6502 that it was possible to squeeze.

When it comes to games where influencing the behaviors of the Non-Player Characters is a large part of gameplay, sure, there's some Dig Dug, and, of course, the amazeballs that is Lemmings, but...

So Lode Runner was a Dig Dug meets Donkey Kong meets Lemmings game that included a level editor. Game play, and level design wasn't twitch based, it was about strategizing how you were going to trap and work around the enemies in order to gather all of the treasure.

And... The Apple 2 had this interesting quirk of how it did its video: In character mode, the screen had 280 characters horizontally, each character (eg: "A") was 7 pixels wide. In graphics mode, each "byte" in the framebuffer had 7 pixels, and one pixel that told which palette the odd and even pixels came from.

The problem is that computers freakin' hate to divide by 7, and when you're trying to squeeze all the performance out of a computer you don't want to divide by 7.

Developers for the Apple ][ addressed this one of two ways: Either they devoted a lot of memory to a lookup table to give them divide by 7 information or if they had an animated character, they drew 7 different frames of animation, one for each of the horizontal positions.

Lode Runner was one of those games where, looking at it, that "aha" moment happened for me: It was really easy to see that it was laid out on a 40x20 grid (The Apple 2 had an additional graphics mode where the bottom 4 lines were text even when the top lines were high res graphics), the animation was all pre-shifted sprites.

The game play and puzzle solving involved using known NPC behavior.

And your friends could create levels and pass them around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72k1ZYp83tc

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