Either that shop was pretty casual about staying on the cutting edge, or release dates were fuzzier back then, because it would often be months of agonized visits before the game showed up on shelves. By then, of course, I’d have gotten another PCMag, and my attention had leapt to a different — clearly far more advanced and interesting — game that was “only days” from launch.

Anyway, during one of my Saturday morning visits to the musty-smelling and over-dehumidified shop, I ended up idly browsing through the Borland section and a Turbo C box caught my eye. My dad was incredibly pumped that I was showing an interest in something that could actually be productive and creative, so he bought it for me.

Unfortunately, nine-year-old me did not turn out to be a natural prodigy. My dad’s coding experience stopped somewhere south of FORTRAN (he had juggled some accounting systems for ABC in the early 1980s) so he tried his best but couldn’t really make it click for me.

So Turbo C went back on the shelf. Dark Forces was coming out next month, and I didn’t have time for twiddling with incomprehensible runes when there were stormtroopers to kill.

What could have been.

I guess what I'm saying is that being interested enough to become competent at a young age doesn't necessarily equate to becoming an industry-leading savant by age 34...nor is it a prerequisite. If you are passionate today, I bet you could still level up to the forefront of whatever niche you care about with enough commitment.

Then I tried to follow the instructions on how to build and run a program on a computer.

I managed to install the IDE they recommended; one called Bloodshed Dev-C++. I managed to type the code for hello world into the IDE, and I managed to compile the program.

It produced an exe file that had a black terminal icon.

I double clicked the exe and it opened and closed very quickly.

It would only be several years later, when I started at the university, that this confusing interaction made sense to me.

At the time I thought I had made some mistake and I didn’t understand what or why.

But what happened of course was that the program started, printed its output and exited, and it all happened so fast that I just saw a window open and quickly close.

Fortunately I did eventually get better introductions to programming. But that first experience was a bit unfortunate heh.

Ended up reading PC Tech journal, wrote an EGA driver for Turbo pascal, and even a few games. Had some silly mine based game written in Turbo Pascal that showed how many mines were adjacent, with the revolutionary idea that you didn't have to hit enter after every move. It floated around as shareware on BBSs, someone even binary edited it make amusing changes to the text when you died. I allowed mines to cause chain reactions, people were amused that past a certain point increasing mine density made the game easier since the chain reactions got larger.

Certainly a different world back then.

Distribution was pretty fuzzy back then.

Also, I suck at LodeRunner.

Agreed, one of my favourites. I also liked the background art, and the animated clips in between some of the different levels, and the CD's Redbook audio soundtrack. It kind of reminds me of the game Creaks.

I also remember it was one of the games that used WinG[0], before DirectX game out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG

Also, the original didn't try to data collect ask to enter a name. For some odd reason, it took a while to get past this annoying dialog box on this web game.

On the original, the player would keep running whereas this new game is laborious in that you need to hold down keys to keep moving. The original keyboard layout is:

  UIO =  dig  up  dig
  JKL = left down right

Someone never played an Electronic Arts game on C64.

Huh? Just about everything that didn't come on a cartridge took forever to load, especially on a C64. That's why there were "fast load" extensions. Most games would load once at the beginning, but sometimes you'd "need to insert disk 2" or "flip the disk over" to finish loading. What was truly impressive is that games like Times of Lore could entirely fit in 64k and only hit the disk when initially loading.

> On the original, the player would keep running whereas this new game is laborious in that you need to hold down keys to keep moving.

The original worked with a joystick, where you'd hold it in the direction to keep running. I'm not sure I ever played the original with the keyboard. You need to be able to stop in loadrunner in order to direct and avoid the movements of the enemies and dig holes in the right spots.

I believe you would run endlessly on the Apple II version, because it had a non-centering joystick and it was more nimble of a game that way. You could stop the character with the space bar.

The MS-DOS version had a nice control scheme with the numeric keypad. You character would run endlessly left or right, but the "5" key on the keypad (right in the center of the arrows) would make him stop.

I think our Compaq Presario at the time must have come packaged with a sierra disk.

Glad to have found about Lode Runner: The Legend Returns, Lode Runner Online: The Mad Monks' Revenge, and its remakes from the comments here. There goes my weekend...

Another very good and free remake (which doesn't even include ads!) for mobile platforms is/was Lode Runner 1 by Nexon. It appears it's no longer on Google Play, but it can be found on APKMirror. I still play it from time to time.

Review: https://toucharcade.com/2017/05/19/lode-runner-1-is-a-well-m...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBSW6r9-lQo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq7xwDrKwBs

I wasted so much time on this as a kid, and this is the most faithful to the //e version that I've ever seen.

The first game I got with my Apple //c was Championship LodeRunner - http://www.oldcomputerstuff.com/championship-lode-runner-cer...

My favorite version of this game runs on the Apple ][ and I am going to fire mine up and have a go this evening to hear the goofy 1 bit sounds.

To play on Android, I had to connect a keyboard.

Is there a value in a total remake (different graphics, art style) of this game? I'm sure many already exist.

Also triggers Firefox canvas fingerprinting protection, but doesn't seem to need it to function. What's it doing there?

Enjoy it now, while X11 is still quasi-relevant and runnable on today's computers!

HN hug of love?