THE EVOLUTION OF: Lode Runner

In the early Eighties, when Broderbund Software cofounder Doug Carlston first set eyes on the game that would ultimately become Lode Runner, Doug Smith’s project had gone through several iterations and lost its co-developer James Bratsanos. Carlston’s initial instinct was to reject it, until some important alterations were made. “It was written on a VAX, so it was a very low-resolution game, and the Apple II version was just a straight translation,” Carlston reflects. “I think the characters in the game were just three pixels, so you couldn’t tell what was going on. So I told Doug Smith that he didn’t need the mazes to be that big; he could make mazes that were smaller and more interesting. He needed to change the scale to make it work, and he also had to change the levels.”

After receiving a revised version of Smith’s work, Broderbund asked the developer to give his platform game 150 levels, at a time when popular platformers such as just had four. “We didn’t think of arcade games as competition, except for ideas,” Carlston clarifies. “The number of levels was a function of what we had available in terms of what was ready to publish. There was no cost to putting more in, and certainly each level took very little space in terms of storage, so that wasn’t an issue. We assumed that we just had to give players enough that it was a