page_title: Lunar Lander (video game genre)
section_title: Graphical games
hierarchical_section_title: Lunar Lander (video game genre) / Graphical games
context_page_description: Lunar Lander is a genre of video games loosely based on the 1969 landing of the Apollo Lunar Module on the moon. In Lunar Lander games, players generally control a spacecraft as it falls toward the surface of the moon or other astronomical body, using thrusters to slow the ship's descent and control its horizontal motion to reach a safe landing area. Crashing into obstacles, hitting the surface at too high a velocity, or running out of fuel all result in failure. In some games in the genre, the ship's orientation must be adjusted as well as its horizontal and vertical velocities.
  The first Lunar Lander game was a text-based game named Lunar, or alternately the Lunar Landing Game, written in the FOCAL programming language for the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 minicomputer by Jim Storer while a high school student in the fall of 1969. Two other versions were written soon after by other programmers in BASIC. Lunar was converted to BASIC by David H. Ahl, who included all three versions in his 1973 book 101 BASIC Computer Games. By the end of the decade, the type of game was collectively known as a "lunar lander" game.
caption: DEC GT40 graphics terminal running Moonlander
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