THE EVOLUTION OF BOULDER DASHTM
Not all videogames begin as entirely fresh ideas. In fact, many take inspiration from existing concepts and then gradually evolve into something new. Take Boulder Dash, for example, which resembled a little known arcade game until Peter Liepa took over from its original developer Chris Gray. “Chris worked on a sort of a clone of a game called The Pit, which he wrote in BASIC,” Peter remembers, “and a local publishing house, In-home Software, was interested in it. It brought Chris and I together with the intent that I would help him commercialise it, but that intention evaporated very quickly as I realised that the rocks always rolled the same way each time you played it – because they were pre-programmed.”
Instead of converting Chris Gray’s game into assembly language, Peter transferred its core mechanics into a new project with gravity-affected boulders rather than on-rail rocks. “I basically started from scratch with a very simple simulation of physics. That was the backbone of the game,” Peter notes. “There was a mathematical concept called cellular automaton, where the idea was that cells changed state according to the cells around them. So I took that general idea and wrote rules for the rocks and gravity. It was like a black world, where everything was in a position on a grid. The rocks were just the letter O, and the dirt was probably just solid squares.”
Initially, lacked level designs and an
