Boulder Dash

User summary

A classic video game for early home computers; Boulder Dash is a 2D puzzle platform game, where the player on each stage must collect a number of crystals for the exit to appear. Each stage consists of crystals, stones, walls and sometimes enemies, all encapsulated in dirt. As the player moves, he digs through the dirt and makes holes. If not resting on dirt, crystals and stones will fall down according to a certain algorithm, and enemies will move around in the open areas. If the player gets hit by an enemy or falling stone or crystal, he dies. Some levels are a puzzle to reach all the necessary crystals, whereas others are more action-oriented, as some enemies will turn into crystals if hit by falling rocks.

The game was released for the Commodore 64, the Atari 400/800, Apple II, MSX, ZX Spectrum, and ColecoVision home computers, and later ported to the NES, BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, PC, Amstrad CPC, Amiga and many other platforms. It was created by Peter Liepa and Chris Gray, and on October 28, 1983, acquired and later published by First Star Software, which still owns the rights to the game. Boulder Dash inherits numerous gameplay similarities from the earlier 1982 arcade game The Pit, by Centuri.

The C64 version was also re-released on the Virtual Console in Europe on September 19, 2008 and in North America on June 1, 2009.

The game Repton, publised by Superior Software for the BBC micron and Acorn Electron was inspired by Boulder Dash and became a huge hit.

Details, such as exact release dates, fetched from Wikipedia, "Boulder_dash," available under the CC-BY-SA License.

Individual credits

Peter Liepa: design
Chris Gray: design

Microbadges

Boulder Dash fan