Lode Runner, a game many of us logged hundreds of hours upon. Lode Runner has a great deal of replay value thanks to its great map editor. The game was first published by Broderbund in 1983, but was first prototyped by Douglas Smith, an architecture student at the University of Washington.
The Lode Runner prototype was called Kong and was originally written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer on campus, but shortly after it was ported to the VAX minicomputer. Originally programmed in FORTRAN and utilized only ASCII character graphics (the most basic of characters).
In September of 1982 Smith was able to port it to the Apple II+ (in assembly language) and renamed it to Miner. In October of that same year he submitted a rough copy to Broderbund and he’s said to have received a one-line rejection letter, “Sorry, your game doesn’t fit into our product line; please feel free to submit future products.”
The original title had no joystick support and was developed in full black and white…not exactly exciting. So, Smith then borrowed money to purchase a color monitor and joystick and continued to improve the game. Around Christmas of 1982, he submitted the game, now renamed Lode Runner, to four publishers and quickly received offers from all four: Sierra, Sirius, Synergistic, and Brøderbund.
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This weeks gaming podcast, emotions run wild while we talk about our initial reactions to Diablo 3’s isometric engine, gaming graphics and overall Diablo experiences. Doug admits to owning two copies of Diablo 2, but doesn’t really know why.
Hey guys, I’ve listened to your podcast since episode 75, and I must say, it’s hard to believe your website isn’t as popular as most gaming podcast sites. I’ve wanted to ask you your thoughts on this holiday line up of games, and if it is enough to convince you to buy a console just for that one game. Thanks guys!
The main reason our site probably isn’t that popular yet is because it’s been in existence for about a month 🙂 TechDiversions.com wasn’t big enough to hold the community we want to build here so we recently expanded it to gamingpodcast.net.
In the coming weeks I’ll be setting up a forum for everyone to chat on, run contests for prizes and other community based things, so stay tuned for that!
To answer your holiday lineup question…well, that will be in the next episode 🙂