
	Platform Apple II Genre Arcade / Puzzle Publisher Brøderbund Developer Douglas E. Smith Released 1983
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Lode Runner

Of all the games that I remember playing as a little kid, the one that probably got the most use was Lode Runner on the Apple IIe. Trying to get all of the treasure on each level, while avoiding the guards, and then escaping to the level above was a ton of fun. As a six or seven year old Mr. Nash, the whole experience was quite exciting, and I always found myself looking forward to the possibility of new levels coming along (thanks to the game’s level editor, but I had yet to grasp the idea of such a thing, and waited for these levels to magically appear from thin air). I’m sure there are a lot of other people who remember the early 80s that also have fond memories of Lode Runner, as it’s arguably one of the most important games to come out of that period.

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Lode Runner had players traversing levels trying to collect stashes of gold, all while avoiding getting caught by the guards, whose job it was to protect the gold. In order to fend off the guards, players could blast holes in the ground that the guards would fall into. While the guard was trapped in the hole, players could run over top of him to the other side of the hole. Over time, the hole would slowly

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regenerated, destroying the guard, and causing a new one to spawn at the top of the level. However, if the player’s character gets stuck in the hole, he will die. After the player has collected all of the gold on that level, they can then head to the top of the level and climb to the next level above. In the original game there was 150 levels to play through. Thanks to a level editor, though, players could make their own levels, and give them to friends on floppy disks. It was interesting to see how quick these new levels could get around, especially considering we didn’t have the Internet at that time.

It was actually quite a complex game despite how simple it might have looked to a passer-by. Players had to constantly think of how they were going to use the terrain to help them get away from the guards. Would it be possible to blast a staircase-like hole to a lower level to run away, or would you just wind up getting stuck in the hole after? Lode Runner does a good job of walking a line between being a fast-paced arcade game, and a thinker’s puzzle game.

In the end, Lode Runner really is one of the most popular games to come out of the early 1980s, and is a testament to the quality of game development at the time. Like so many titles to come along in this era, it was created by a single person, in this case Douglas E. Smith, who was an architecture student at the University of Washington at the time. He just kept refining the game, and submitting it to publishers until it got picked up, and went on to become a hit. The game has been ported to countless other platforms over time, and has even made its way to XBLA recently and still continues to entertain. Regardless, I think my fondest memories of Lode Runner will be the time that I spent playing it as a kid on an Apple IIe.

Mr. Nash
March 9, 2010