Lode Runner belongs up there with Mario, Sonic and Donkey Kong

If the little stick guy from Lode Runner only had a face to go with the way he/she/it moved across levels and mowed down bad guys, his/her/its mug would probably be plastered on every video game magazine available at least once a year.

What? You’ve never heard of Lode Runner? Well, that’s kinda impossible, but for those who aren’t kidding when they say that they’ve never even seen stick man running around brick platforms, climbing stairs and collecting mounds of what seems to be gold dust, here’s a little backgrounder for you:

Lode Runner is a 1983 platform game, first published by Broderbund. It’s 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.

The prototype of what later became Lode Runner was a game developed by Douglas Smith of Renton, Washington, who at the time was an architecture student at the University of Washington. This prototype, called (ironically!) 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 (around 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 Broderbund around 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.”

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 Broderbund.

And the rest, as they say, is history. I still play Lode Runner, although I must admit that I’m not as good as I used to be, especially when I had been playing the game on my old Apple IIc.

The gameplay is simple. The player controls a, sigh, stick figure who must collect all the gold in a level while avoiding robots (oh, those stick figures going after the good stick figure were robots?). 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 the players’ problem-solving skills and reaction times.

At this point, let me just shut up and make you watch a video of the game: