Lode Runner (1983) — The Allowance He Paid the Neighborhood Kids

はじめに

Lode Runner is a puzzle-platformer Douglas E. Smith released through Brøderbund in June 1983. A square-headed runner digs holes in brick platforms to drop pursuing guards, grabs gold, and climbs a tower of levels. That simple structure sold across the world.

Today, though, what I want to dig up isn't the game itself. It's the 'edit mode' Smith shipped alongside it — a feature that let players build their own levels.

A feature added because one developer couldn't finish 150 levels alone would go on to give Japan one of its most enduring characters, and its fingerprints are still on Steam's shelves more than four decades later.

その時代の文脈

In 1981, Smith was a University of Washington student studying architecture and numerical analysis. With friends, he'd ported a game called Kong onto the school's VAX-11/780, hiding it inside a fake graph-plotting program so the administration wouldn't notice.

After his eight-year-old nephew kept asking, he wrote an Apple II version over a single three-day weekend. Brøderbund rejected the first monochrome version. Only after he rebuilt it in color bitmap graphics, with dual-button controls for digging left or right, did a deal come together.

Brøderbund offered a $10,000 advance and a 23% royalty. Smith turned down a $100,000 flat-fee offer from another publisher and took this deal instead. The game was originally called Miner; the publisher renamed it Lode Runner.

メカニクス — 六つの動詞と、独りでは作れなかった150面

Just six verbs: move in four directions, dig left, dig right. That's all. Instead of scripting enemy behavior level by level, Smith wrote a general-purpose engine that read level data and drove enemies from it — which is how 150 levels could ship on the same underlying logic.

Even so, he couldn't design 150 levels by himself. He reportedly paid neighborhood kids per level to help. Brøderbund arranged the results into difficulty order and encouraged him to keep the editor itself as a shipping feature.

Hudson Soft's Famicom port in Japan was released on July 20, 1984. Sources long reported July 31, but interviews with people connected to Hudson have confirmed July 20 as the correct date. That port shipped its own edit mode, letting players build a 14-by-13-tile screen — ahead of Nintendo's own editors in Excitebike and Wrecking Crew.

In 1985, a build-your-own-level contest run by CoroCoro Comic drew 198,533 entries. That number shows just how seriously kids of the time took the idea that a game could be something you built, not just played.

現代への系譜

That edit mode bore unexpected fruit in Hudson Soft's own Bomberman (Famicom version, released December 20, 1985). Bomberman's design is said to have been built by reusing an enemy graphic from Hudson's Lode Runner port. In Bomberman's ending, the bomb-wielding protagonist transforms into Lode Runner's hero — the game was built as a prequel to Lode Runner.

Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris (1984), reportedly named Lode Runner as a favorite puzzle game of his for years. As I've written before, the computer scientist in Moscow was another person this digging game had reached.

The path Smith chose in 1983 — ship an editor alongside the game, and turn players into designers — keeps resurfacing in new forms. In 2012, Valve added an official Puzzle Maker to Portal 2, with sharing through Steam Workshop. PuzzleScript, which I've written about before, is another descendant of the same idea: hand players the rules and the editor from day one. I can't claim a direct line runs from Smith to either of them. But the choice to make edit mode part of the game itself hasn't aged a day in over forty years.

参考文献

Sources referenced in this article:

・Wikipedia: Lode Runner

・Wikipedia (Japanese): Lode Runner

・Wikipedia: Douglas E. Smith

・The Digital Antiquarian: Lode Runner

・GAME Watch: Lode Runner Famicom version's 40th anniversary (Japanese)

・Wikipedia: Bomberman (1983 video game)

・Portal Wiki: Puzzle Creator

おわりに

The reason Smith added the editor is almost anticlimactic: he simply couldn't finish 150 levels alone. He surely never expected that modest motive to give Japan a beloved character, or to still be casting a shadow on puzzle game design more than forty years later.

June 1983: one floppy disk on a Brøderbund shelf. I want to write that date down once more. Strata always sit buried beneath small dates like this one.