2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Lunar Lander on the PDP-1

What happened

While many people think the game started with Atari’s 1979 arcade cabinet, the first version– then only text based, and called the Lunar Landing Game –actually dates back 10 years before that, and was dreamed up at DEC on a PDP-8. A lot of the retrocomputing world is focused on the 1980s, and for good reason– the home computer revolution was in full swing in that decade, and there is a veritable Cambrian Explosion of capable hardware to play with, emulate or recreate.

Both Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP series and the game Lunar Lander are probably iconic enough in their own right to need no introduction, but there’s actually a connection between them. If you’re of a certain vintage, odds are, you probably typed in the BASIC version of the Lunar Landing Game at some point. Of course, if you’ve seen SpaceWar you know DEC’s first minicomputer can handle the graphics.