Welcome to another installment of Retro Fri-Dave.  This week’s musings will be about another of my “first” games.  Not an arcade game, but available on a number of other platforms, Lode Runner was immensely popular.

My first exposure to Lode Runner occurred when I was working at a used computer store.  I was in college at the time, and after class I worked the store till closing.  Once all of the customers had left, the cash was counted, the floors swept, and the doors locked, my fellow employees and I would turn down the lights and play games with the computers on the showroom floor.  Grabbing a soda, usually an Orange Crush, we would make a bee line for the Commodore 64, and fire up Lode Runner.

Lode Runner is a two-dimensional maze like game that has you running around collecting gold and avoiding things like robots and pits.  We would play the game until it got late or the soda-induced sugar buzz wore off.

Although more simplistic, the game play of Lode Runner is somewhat similar to Portal.  Like that game, in Lode Runner you create “holes” to create passages to places that are otherwise inaccessible.  You can use these newly formed holes to trap the robots that relentlessly pursue you, and in certain variants of the game you can use bombs (available at some of the higher levels) to blow up walls or your enemies.

Any way you look at it, playing Lode Runner after work with the guys was a great way to end your work day, that is if you consider talking about computers and playing games to “demonstrate” a system’s abilities, work.

While I was out looking up some info on the game I found a Java version of the game, so you can play it for yourself here.

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