Shoot for the moon in our Python version of the Atari hit, Lunar Lander. Mark Vanstone has the code.
Atari’s cabinet featured a thrust control, two buttons for rotating, and an abort button in case it all went horribly wrong.
Lunar Lander
First released in 1979 by Atari, Lunar Lander was based on a concept created a decade earlier. The original 1969 game (actually called Lunar) was a text-based affair that involved controlling a landing module’s thrust to guide it safely down to the lunar surface; a later iteration, Moonlander, created a more visual iteration of the same idea on the DEC VT50 graphics terminal.
Given that it appeared at the height of the late-seventies arcade boom, though, it was Atari’s coin-op that became the most recognisable version of Lunar Lander, arriving just after the tenth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Again, the aim of the game was to use rotation and … // Read more: original article.
