Soft Landing: a lunar lander for the 8-bit heart
A small ship, a little fuel, a wobbly vector skyline in Atari 800XL or Commodore 64 blue, and three pads that pay more the narrower they are. Set down slow, straight and level. A mood the game and you keep together, in the browser, full screen if you want it.
Soft Landing is a lunar lander the way a home computer in 1983 would have shown it, drawn in stroked lines and 3x5 digits by a browser in 2026. Gravity pulls, the main engine pushes along the ship's axis, two side jets tilt it. The skyline below is a wobbly polyline with three flat pads: the wide one pays once, the middle one twice, the narrow one four times. A landing is safe only on a pad, falling slower than 24 units a second, drifting slower than 14, and within about fourteen degrees of level. Points are the multiplier times fifty, twenty-five more for a truly soft touch, plus the fuel left. Every landing refunds fuel and brings a new skyline. Three landers. The game keeps a mood with you, the same model Breakwater keeps. A controlled burn that leaves you slower raises its energy, and so does every hundred units you descend. A crash lowers its calm; time brings both back. DAWN is warming up. FLOW is a run of good landings with the music opened up. RUSH is hot colors, raster bars in the border, a crosswind, and a sliver of a pad worth five. DRIFT is what happens after a crash: gravity softens, the pads widen, the notes thin out. You set a dial, CALM, PLAY or RUSH, and the game relaxes toward it. In CALM the fuel never runs out and a crash never ends the game. Two tributes to pick from. The Atari 800XL mode is the Graphics 0 blue with a black border and light-blue lines, with a raw filtered-noise roar for the engine, the POKEY spirit. The Commodore 64 mode is the blue field inside a light-blue border, with a resonant filter on the roar and a sweep on every cue, the SID spirit. Each boots with its own READY prompt before the skyline appears. Nothing is emulated and nothing is copied. It is built for a phone held upright and for a desktop in full screen. Hold the middle of the field to burn and the sides to tilt. The instruments turn red when a speed or the attitude would not survive. The mood tape from your session stays in your browser, and when you leave after a game, the game hands its mood to the town. [Play Soft Landing](/soft-landing). [Read the machine edition](/soft-landing.json). [Breakwater, the first game in the row](/breakwater). [The research note on Lunar Lander and its home-computer descendants](https://github.com/mhoydich/pointcast/blob/main/docs/notes/2026-10-22-soft-landing-notes.md).
