<-- tape loading sound 

O = Rotate anticlockwise, P = Rotate clockwise, SHIFT or [ = Main Engine
SPACE =Abort to Automatic Control

F11 = mute sound 
PgUp, PgDn =change sound volume

Emulator: Qaop Original Hardware: ZX Spectrum Programming language: Hisoft Pascal with machine code to load LEM and explosion graphics from lookup tables.

The game was written by Ian Rich, who was my partner in 'Darkstar Software', which ran from December 1983 to the summer of 1985. The plan was Ian would write the games and I'd do marketing and sales. That shifted to our licensing games from other people and we broke the partnership when I moved from Leeds to London. The other games were for the Oric-1 computer. I licensed 'Apollo 11' to Mastertronic in 1985. Someone there misread '11' as 'II' and they released it as "Apollo 2". Or maybe it was clever marketing: 'Apollo 2: the sequel'. The Darkstar version had an inlay card printed on glossy Kodak photographic paper instead of the usual card, the idea being it would stand out on a shop's shelf.
The cover shows the real Apollo 11 LEM in lunar orbit (the photo was licensed from a picture library). It would have suited Eagle Lander 3D.

Apollo 11 cassette inlay card consisting of a photo of the real lunar lander on the right hand side, with the text 'APOLLO 11' in bright yellow Hollywood letters above it, and with four small pictures of the game on the left hand side, and the words picture of a Philips compact audio tape cassette bearing the markings 'Darkstar' and Apollo 11'

The image shown below displays for the 6 minutes it takes for the game loads from tape. Its is a 1-bit digitisation of the cover photo, made at Leeds Technology Centre using a monochrome video camera connected to an Apple II. We printed out the data and keyed the values in to the Spectrum (well, Ian did). Colour was added by hand.

low resolution digitisation of photo from the cassette cover'

The screws holding the cassette tape together are starting to go rusty.

close up of the cassette showing rust and dust'

For more about the game see World of Spectrum, which has another emulation of Apollo 11 and information on Discs of Death which Ian wrote later.

More: a compendium of Lunar Lander game sites    a Vector graphics Lander    and another

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