Lunar Lander was the first of 13 vector graphic games produced by Atari. The original architecture for the vector generator came out of Atari's Grass Valley group. They had built a prototype of a system that could display vectors on an appropriate monitor. It wasn't ready for production, but it did clearly demonstrate the viability of their ideas. I was given the job of cleaning it up, working out the bugs, adding all of the features necessary for using it in an arcade game, and making it producible. The task was challenging, because along with the vector generator itself, I needed to work closely with other engineers who were designing the vector monitor. Changes in one often lead to changes in the other. But after months of work, our lab began to light up with the glow of vector generated graphics.
Of course, without a game that people wanted to play, all of our effort would have been for nothing. I was put in charge of a team of game developers, and we decided to create an arcade version of the classic computer game Lunar Lander.
It was important to me to have a good controller that would give a sense of authority, and so I commissioned a throttle control that the player could wrap his hand around. I wanted good audio, particularly when the player crashed, so I designed a handful of discrete audio circuits feeding a high power amplifier. And I wanted any player, from novice to expert, to be able to have a good time playing the game. Therefore, I put in four levels of difficulty.
Lunar Lander was an immediate hit, but as manufacturing was turning out hundreds of Lunar Lander machines each week, word was getting out about an even more exciting game waiting in the wings. When the pressure to start shipping Asteroids got too great, Lunar Lander production was stopped. In fact, the first 300 Asteroids machines were built in Lunar Lander cabinets.
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