🚀 Lunar Lander

How to play Lunar Lander

Lunar Lander is the arcade physics puzzle where you guide a fragile spacecraft to a soft landing on the moon. You have limited fuel, real gravity working against you, and a flat landing pad somewhere on the rocky surface. Touch down too fast or off the pad and the lander crumples.

Controls

• ↑ — main thruster
• ← → — rotate the lander

Tips & strategy

• Watch your vertical speed. Speed at touchdown is what crashes you — not altitude. The HUD shows your descent rate; keep it slow on approach.
• Burn fuel early, not late. It's cheaper to bleed off speed gradually than to hover-burn at the last second. Decelerate from altitude.
• Rotate before you thrust. The thruster pushes along your current angle. Rotate first, then burn — horizontal drift is hard to correct from low.
• Aim for the wider pads. Some landing zones offer 5x or 10x bonus multipliers in exchange for being narrower. If you're low on fuel, take the easy pad.

About Lunar Lander

Lunar Lander shipped from Atari in 1979 as one of the first arcade games with vector graphics — a black background and crisp white lines. It was descended from a 1969 text-based simulation written by a high-school student named Jim Storer, which spread through DEC user groups for years before Atari turned it into a coin-op.

Frequently asked

How do I play Lunar Lander? Use the up arrow to thrust and left/right arrows to rotate. Aim for a flat landing pad and touch down at a low vertical speed without running out of fuel.

Is Lunar Lander free? Yes — no signup, no downloads, no installs.

What's a "good" landing speed? Generally under about 2 m/s vertical at touchdown. Anything faster and the lander breaks.

Does my high score save? Yes — your best Lunar Lander score is stored locally in your browser.

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