Format: Flash
Developer: Atari/Seb Lee-Delisle
sebleedelisle.com/games/moonlander/

Technology’s often quite good at shrinking things – and that’s not just true of the technology that comes inside transistor radios. Take time, for instance: with the likes of Flash, XNA, and Java, games that might once have needed six months or a year to coax into life can now be designed and coded in the space of a few days, and then published, played, and thoroughly critiqued over the course of a weekend.

Amongst other things, this raises the prospect of topical games, a potentially fascinating form of leftfield commentary in which current events are transformed into platformers or action titles, while big ideas become power-ups, the great and good are reduced to pixelated NPCs. The rate at which Flash games (albeit largely tedious Flash games) sprang up during the last American election certainly seems to attest to this possibility, so it’s slightly surprising to hunt about for a game commemorating the moon landings – the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission falls next Thursday – without finding much of interest. Rapid prototyping still has its limits, it would seem (although the relaunch of the Experimental Game Project suggests we may be in for some promising monthly developments in this area – more on this next week).

All of which means we’ll have to go for relevance over timeliness, then, and that means there’s only really one place to turn. Atari’s Lunar Lander remains the ultimate space game, just as long as you’re talking about real space rather than the more familiar imaginary variety. This is an engineer’s take on interplanetary travel, where your enemies are gravity, careless handling, and running out of fuel, rather than stray laser beams and sinister greys. With simple presentation and a handful of on-screen readouts, Lunar Lander offers a sense of the quiet, mathematical drama of bringing Eagle safely into the Sea of Tranquillity, revealing the true history of space exploration as an achievement built from slide rules and conversion tables, burn rates and launch windows – a feat playing out in a universe that wasn’t filled with glamorous extra-terrestrial intrigue as much as it was simply vast, empty, and uncaring.

Playing it today isn’t difficult. There are a lot of Lunar Lander clones knocking about online, each with their own twist and visual style, but none have quite the graphical clarity of Atari’s original, however – the chattering update rate and those blazing white vectors calling to mind the technology of the golden age of space exploration in a way that the air-brushed artwork of most of the remakes can’t. So, presumably raising the spectre of questionable legality, a port of the arcade game is available here.

It’s tempting to argue that it’s more than simply a matter of technology that linked videogames in their most primitive form to the dawn of the space age (Spacewar, created in 1962, arrived in the same year that saw Friendship 7 orbit the planet). After all, within four years of the first moon landings, we’d packed up and headed home with no real reason to return: the geology had been probed, golf balls had been whacked into the gloomy distance, and, more importantly, the TV ratings had started to slide. In their place, rather than travel outwards across the stars, we travelled inwards, nebulae and quasars fizzing and spinning within the confines of silicon and plastic, flickering television sets replacing the tubular glow of hulking NASA monitors. For everyone looking for adventure, mystery, and the threat of colourful disaster out there in a bustling cosmos that can be circumnavigated in the space of a few mouse clicks, then, there are a million games to choose between. For genuine astronauts, one suspects, there’s Lunar Lander, and not much else.