Lode Runner

Lode Runner
Cover art
Developer(s)	Douglas E. Smith
Publisher(s)	Brøderbund & Ariolasoft
Platform(s)	Apple II, VIC-20, Commodore 64, PC Booter, ZX Spectrum, Atari XL/XE, SG-1000, XBLA, Windows, iPod, Macintosh, Virtual Console, PlayStation Network, BBC Micro, Atari Lynx, PlayStation, NES, SNES, Amstrad CPC
Release date(s)	1983 Virtual Console JP March 6, 2007 NA June 11, 2007 PAL March 12, 2010 Xbox Live Arcade April 22, 2009
Genre(s)	Platform, Puzzle
Mode(s)	Single-player
Rating(s)	ESRB: Everyone (VC) PEGI: 3
Media/distribution	Cartridge (Physical) Floppy disk (Physical)
System requirements Keyboard

Lode Runner is a 1983 platform game, first published by Brøderbund. It is one of the first games to include a level editor, a feature that allows players to create their own levels for the game. This feature bolstered the game's popularity, as magazines such as Computer Gaming World held contests to see who could build the best level.^[1] Tozai, Inc. is now currently holds the IP and Trademark rights of Lode Runner.^[2]

History

The prototype of what later became Lode Runner was a game developed by Douglas E. Smith of Renton, Washington, who at the time was an architecture student at the University of Washington.^[3] This prototype, called Kong, was written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer limited to one building on the UW campus. Shortly thereafter, Kong was ported to VAX minicomputers, as there were more terminals available on campus. The game was programmed in Fortran and used ASCII character graphics. When Kong was ported to the VAX, some Pascal sections were mixed into the original Fortran code.

In a weekend (circa September 1982), Smith was able to build a crude, playable version in 6502 assembly language on an Apple II+ and renamed the game Miner. Through the end of the year, Smith refined that version, which was black-and-white with no joystick support. He submitted a rough version to Brøderbund around October 1982 and received a one-line rejection letter in response to the effect of "Sorry, your game doesn't fit into our product line; please feel free to submit future products."^[3]

Smith then borrowed money to purchase a color monitor and joystick and continued to improve the game. Around Christmas of 1982, he submitted the game, now renamed Lode Runner, to four publishers and quickly received offers from all four: Sierra, Sirius, Synergistic, and Brøderbund. He took the deal with Brøderbund.

One issue with Miner is that, like its text-based Kong predecessors, it lacks inter-square animation. Although it uses high-resolution graphics, the players move around the board in whole-square increments. Brøderbund wanted a game with sophisticated pixel-level animation.^[4] According to this article, Smith was given a $10,000 advance by Brøderbund to develop the inter-square animation, and to provide 150 levels of play.

The game was released in mid-1983. The original microcomputer versions included the Apple II series, the Atari 8-bit family, the Commodore 64 and a Konami version licensed for the MSX computer named "King's Valley". Later versions include those for the Atari ST, Sinclair Spectrum 48K/128K, NES, Windows 3.1, Macintosh, and the original Game Boy.

Gameplay

Screenshot from Apple II version

Basics

The player controls a stick figure who must collect all the gold in a level while avoiding guards who try to catch the player. After collecting all the gold, the player must travel to the top of the screen to reach the next level. There are 150 levels in the game which progressively challenge players' problem-solving abilities or reaction times.

Levels feature a multi-storey, brick platform motif, with ladders and suspended hand-to-hand bars that offer multiple ways to travel throughout. The player can dig holes into floors to temporarily trap guards and may safely walk atop trapped guards. Should a guard be carrying a bar of gold when he falls into a hole it will be left behind, and can be retrieved by the player. Over time, floors dug into will regenerate, filling in these holes. A trapped guard who cannot escape a hole before it fills is consumed, immediately respawning in a random location at the top of the level. Unlike guards, the player's character may not climb up out of a hole, and will be killed if it fills before he can escape by other means. Floors may also contain trapdoors, through which the player and guards will fall, and bedrock, through which the player cannot dig.

Notably, the player can only dig a hole to the sides, and not directly underneath himself. This introduces an important strategy: when digging a hole X blocks high, the player must first dig a gap at least X wide to be able to dig through it, as the number of spaces will shrink with each layer, and the player needs at least one free adjacent space to be able to dig. However, exceptions to this rule arise when the player digs from the position of standing on a ladder, or hanging from a hand-to-hand bar, which allows the player to repeatedly dig and descend one row. This kind of digging is involved in solving many of the levels.

The player starts with five lives; each level completion awards an extra life. Should a guard catch the player, one life is lost and the current level restarts. The player's character can fall from arbitrary heights without injury but cannot jump, and players can trap themselves in pits from which the only escape is to abort the level, costing a life, and begin again.

Enemy A.I.

The guards do not simply hone in on the player by always taking the shortest path, but also move in seemingly counter-intuitive ways according to a strange algorithm. This is a key factor in game logic, especially in the advanced levels, where exploiting the behavior of the guards is essential toward attaining the solution. Sometimes when the player and a guard are on the same ladder, for instance, the guard will move away from the player. In general, depending on the exact positioning relative to Lode Runner, the guards sometimes appear to be repelled. The behavior is far from random, however. A big part of mastering the game involves developing the intuition to predict the movement of the guards.

Permitted contact

The player may come into contact with a guard directly from above, with the stick figure's feet touching the guard's head. This is what enables the player to walk over guards who are temporarily stuck in a hole that has been dug. It is also possible to make this contact while both the guard and the player are in free fall, since the player not only runs faster than the guards, but also falls faster; moreover, it is possible to survive the feet-to-head contact while a guard is standing on a platform and begins to move. Both forms of contact are necessary to solve some levels. Sometimes it is necessary to liberate a trapped guard by digging while standing on his head, but then moving rapidly in the opposite direction when the guard begins marching to freedom. In a few levels, it is necessary to use a falling guard as a bridge to reach an otherwise unreachable area. One subtlety is that if a down movement is initiated while standing on a guard's head, or briefly touching the guard's head during free fall, the consequences are fatal.

Trapping and using guards

In some levels, guards can be deliberately trapped in various ways. For instance, they can be lured into entering a part of the level from which there is no escape. In some situations, the player can liberate trapped guards by digging them out. In some levels, to collect some of the gold pieces, the player must exploit the guards into collecting gold pieces, because they are positioned such that whichever figure collects them will become trapped. When the guard collects the piece and becomes trapped, the player can release the guard and then later steal the gold when the guard drops it or falls into a hole.

In some levels, there are gold pieces which can only be collected by killing guards by trapping them in dug holes which close up. Deceased guards come back to life from locations near the top of the screen, which may allow them to reach parts of the level that cannot be reached by the player.

Traversal orders

Some levels require careful ordering of traversal, because they are divided into zones connected by passages which are impossible to traverse in the reverse direction. If a gold piece remains in an unreachable zone, the player may have to abort the level to start again, losing a life, unless there is a way to coax a guard into bringing the gold.

Timing

Some of the game's puzzles in the advanced levels are time-sensitive. The player must dig in order to penetrate the interior of some cavern to collect gold, and quickly return the same way before the digging repairs itself, enclosing Lode Runner in that cavern with no means of escape.

Some of the puzzles require deliberate timing among the digging actions because Lode Runner must run over previously dug-out tiles that have just repaired themselves, while having enough time to pass through ones which have not yet repaired.

Inference and guessing

In some levels, when they are encountered for the first time, the player must deduce the solution by identifying a hypothesis which must be true if the level is to be solvable at all, but without direct evidence that the hypothesis is true. For instance, a given gold piece is positioned in such a way that when the player reaches it, he will become trapped, and there is positively no way to fool a guard into collecting that gold. The only conclusion is that this gold piece must be collected last, which will cause a ladder to appear, allowing the player to escape. In some levels, hidden traps are key to the solution. Their presence and location must be deduced or found by trial and error. To allow time for reasoning about each solution, Lode Runner begins each level in an indefinitely paused state. Nothing moves until a key is pressed or a joystick control is activated.

Behavior from axioms

The complexity of Lode Runner gameplay is the consequence of the interaction of the simple rules which govern the movement and behavior of material within the game's two-dimensional field. None of the puzzles involve special objects or rules with dedicated programming. That is to say, in Lode Runner, the more difficult levels are that way strictly due to their initial arrangement of game pieces. All of the cleverness of a given level can be replicated in a user-defined level simply by arranging an identical board. Furthermore, all of the objects and rules in Lode Runner are introduced very early the first two or three levels, which stands in contrast to some other kinds of games in which higher levels bring in new kinds of objects with new behaviors.

However, there is one important behavioral change in Lode Runner. Each time the player completes all the available levels on a disk, the levels are reused for another round of play, so for instance if there are the standard 150 levels, level 151 uses the same layout as level 1. The difference is that the guards, who are much slower than the player in the first round of levels, become slightly faster with each round. A sufficient speed increase on the part of the guards will eventually make any level impossible to solve. This is readily demonstrated by designing a game disk with just one level and playing that level over and over again.

Keyboard controls

The original Apple II Lode Runner game can be controlled by keyboard or joystick. Keyboard mode has the important and useful behavior that the next move can be requested before Lode Runner finishes moving into a given square of the board. For instance, if Lode Runner is running toward a ladder, the command to go up the ladder can be given slightly in advance of completely entering that ladder's square. The tolerance is generous enough that with practice it is possible to keep Lode Runner moving through convoluted paths which frequently change direction, yet without pausing for so much as a single frame of animation. And, of course, the game contains some advanced timing problems which require just that.

Bugs

In the original Apple II version of the game, when Lode Runner consumes the last piece of gold in a level, and some escape ladders appear, if at the same time a Bungeling guard who just died is being regenerated in the same square where an escape ladder is appearing, the regeneration fails to complete. The ladder is shown as superimposed over a partially generated guard, which stays that way indefinitely. Lode Runner must not come into contact with this partially generated guard, or else lose a life.

Related games

The game is an excellent example of the trap-em-up genre, which also includes games like Heiankyo Alien, Boomer's Adventure in Asmik World, and Space Panic.

Brøderbund referred to the game's guards as members of the Bungeling Empire, enemies common to Choplifter, the Lode Runner series, and Raid on Bungeling Bay.

Reception

A review in Computer Gaming World praised the game's particularly easy-to-use level editor and the strategy involved for an arcade title, describing it as "one of the few thinking men's arcade games".^[5] Tetris designer Alexey Pajitnov claimed it to be his favorite puzzle game for many years.^[6]

Computer Gaming World also noted that the animated characters in Lode Runner were "borrowed" from Choplifter, an earlier Brøderbund title.^[5] Smith claims the characters were not borrowed, but because the characters are only 7x10 pixels, there are inevitable cosmetic similarities.^{[citation needed]}

GameSpot named Lode Runner as one of the "Greatest Games of All Time". [1]

Ports

Over the years, Lode Runner was ported to numerous systems, including Commodore 64, MSX, Atari ST, PC-8001, PC-8801, PC-6001, PC-6601, X1, FM-7, SG-1000, Atari 400/800, PC-9801, MS-DOS, IBM PC, Mac OS, Amstrad CPC, NES, Game Boy, BBC Micro, Nintendo DS, PlayStation, Virtual Console, Xbox 360 (XBLA) and iPod.

Series

• Lode Runner (1983), the original game published by Brøderbund, developed for Apple II, contained 150 levels and level editor.
• Championship Lode Runner (1984), a direct sequel with 50 levels edited by fans and intended for expert play. This game is also scheduled to be released in Japan on October 27, 2009 on the Virtual Console.
• Lode Runner's Rescue (~1985) 3-D sequel at least available for the Atari 8-bit computers^[7] and the Commodore 64, including dozens of 3-D perspective levels and screen design editor.
• Hyper Lode Runner (1989) for the original Game Boy.

A Lode Runner board game was designed by Donal Carlston and published by Tsukuda in 1986.^[8]

Arcade

In 1984, Irem developed an arcade conversion of Lode Runner which contained 24 selected levels from the 150 original levels.

Irem brought many of their arcade inspired levels to the Famicom Disk System under the names Super Lode Runner and Super Lode Runner II.

The arcade version had numerous sequels, including:

• Lode Runner: The Bungeling Strikes Back (1984), an advanced remake of the original game developed for the arcade. The gameplay is almost exactly the same (save the addition of a two player mode) and the only heavy modification was the graphics and advancement to a 512 color palette.

• Lode Runner: Majin No Fukkatsu (1985)
• Lode Runner: Teikoku Karano Dasshutsu (1986)
• Lode Runner: The Dig Fight (2000)

1990s

• Lode Runner: The Legend Returns, a 1994 Sierra remake of the original game with enhanced graphics and tools.
• Lode Runner Online: Mad Monks' Revenge, the 1995 sequel which replaced all the elements of the previous plus new online play.
• Lode Runner 2 (1998), Isometric 3D gameplay
• Lode Runner 3-D (1999) for the Nintendo 64.

Several versions of Lode Runner were not released in the U.S., such as Lode Runner Twin and Power Lode Runner (1999, SFC), which vary gameplay, mostly by adding different characters and scenarios. Another title, Battle Lode Runner, was originally exclusive to Japan, but made available in April 2007 on Nintendo's Virtual Console service.^{[citation needed]} The original Lode Runner followed in June 2007. There is also a Cubic Lode Runner, a 3-D Lode Runner variant released only in Japan for the Nintendo GameCube and PlayStation 2.^[9]

The NES version, developed by Hudson Soft, marked the first appearance of Bombermen as the opposing robots. The end screen to Bomberman for the NES notes that the original White Bomberman has turned human and hints at his appearance in another game, with the Lode Runner behind him. In the Japanese version, the reference is more direct: "Congratulations - Bomber Man becomes Runner - See you again in Lode Runner."

In Japan, the Famicom version of Lode Runner allows editing and creating levels to share with friends using a Famicom Data Recorder.

Hudson Soft also announced a version of Lode Runner for the Nintendo DS and released in 2006.^[10]

Xbox Live Arcade

Xbox Live Arcade version.

On January 7, 2008, a remake of Lode Runner, developed by Tozai and SouthEnd Interactive, was announced at CES '08, and was released on April 22, 2009. The game features revamped 3D graphics, additional game modes, cooperative and competitive multiplayer support, six new block types and a level editor, as well as Live leaderboards and a timeline of the game's history.^[11][12]

iPod

Lode Runner was made available for the click-wheel version of Apple's iPod in mid-December 2008 with enhanced, scrolling graphics. It was released by HudsonSoft. It contains 130 levels and several tutorial videos.

References

1. ^ "Lode Runner Contest", Computer Gaming World: 22, August 1984 
2. ^ Tozai Games
3. ^ ^{a b} "Lock'n'Lode", IGN, 1999-02-17, http://ign64.ign.com/articles/066/066952p1.html 
4. ^ Loderunner: Ancient History! (Usenet posting to rec.games.programmer), 1991-04-07, http://entropymine.com/jason/lr/misc/ldhist.html 
5. ^ ^{a b} Besnard, John (October 1983), "Lode Runner", Computer Gaming World: 20 
6. ^ "Interview: The Man Who Changed Everything". http://www.next-gen.biz/features/interview-man-who-changed-everything. Retrieved 2008-01-01. 
7. ^ Atari 400 800 XL XE Lode Runner's Rescue : scans, dump, download, screenshots, ads, videos, catalog, instructions, roms
8. ^ Lode Runner | BoardGameGeek
9. ^ キュービックロードランナー公式サイト
10. ^ LodeRunner | ロードランナー
11. ^ Lode Runner for Xbox 360 on GameRankings
12. ^ Lode Runner (X360) Review, IGN

External links

• Lode Runner guide at StrategyWiki
• Lode Runner series at MobyGames
• Jason Summer's Lode Runner Archive
• Lode Runner: Ancient History!
• The Lode Runner Museum website
• Website of one of the later Lode Runner's actual creators
• Lode Runner at the Killer List of Videogames
• Lode Runner on Xbox Live Arcade