Crashing into obstacles, hitting the surface at too high a velocity, or running out of fuel all result in failure.

The game, written by Jack Burness and named Moonlander, was distributed with DEC computers and displayed at trade shows.

In 1979, Atari released a vector graphics arcade video game version of the concept as Lunar Lander.

[2][3] It was originally written in the FOCAL programming language for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 minicomputer by Jim Storer while a student at Lexington High School in the fall of 1969, and uploaded to the system library as Rocket after Christmas break.

Their popularity led him to start printing BASIC games in the DEC newsletter, both his own and reader submissions.

[2] The first known use of the name Lunar Lander for a video game of this type was in the 1975 book What to Do After You Hit Return, a collection of BASIC computer games by the People's Computer Company similar to Ahl's book, which included versions named Crash and Lunar Lander.

[6] Another Lunar Lander video game was commercially distributed for some programmable calculators such as in 1975 for the Hewlett-Packard HP-25.

[11] While Ahl did not list a common name for the three similar titles in his book, the style of game was collectively seen as its own subgenre, with InfoWorld referring to LEM in February 1979 as "a lunar lander" and Antic terming the set of text-based games as "Lunar Landers" in 1986.

The goal remains to correctly land an Apollo Lunar Module on the surface of the Moon using the game's telemetry data.

[16] In August 1979, Atari, Inc. produced an arcade video game version of the concept as Lunar Lander.

It uses monochrome vector graphics and allows the player to rotate the ship right or left and fire thrusters via proportional throttle control system using a joystick with a spring.

[17][18] The vector engine was inspired by Space Wars (1978) and created by Rick Moncrief and Wendi Allen,[Note 1] who developed Lunar Lander alongside Rich Moore.

The idea for the game came from Allen, who had seen a graphical version of the game, likely Moonlander, a few years prior; Atari employees had also seen Moonlander years prior at the NASA Ames Research Center and attempted to create an arcade version with raster graphics in 1975.

[22] Tom Hudson wrote Retrofire, a more elaborate version of the lander concept for Atari 8-bit computers in 1983; it uses a 3D isometric view, so there are three velocities to control (along the X, Y, and Z axes).

[23] Other games include Apollo 11 (1983) for the ZX Spectrum,[24] Marslander (1983) for the Acorn Electron and BBC Micro,[25] and versions of Lunar Lander for the Commodore PET and TRS-80.

Modern versions and remakes have been made for computers, consoles such as the Wii U, iOS, Android, mobile phones, and browsers.

[4] The Lunar Lander arcade game proved popular and commercially successful, selling approximately 4,700 cabinets.