Lode Runner

Lode Runner is a puzzle game disguised as an action game, and it is the reason a whole genre of digging-and-trapping games exists. You are a runner in a brick maze, and the goal is simply to collect every gold bar without being caught.

What makes that more than a chase is the digging. You cannot jump, but you can burn a hole through the floor to your left or right, and anything standing on that tile falls in. Dig two holes side by side and an enemy drops into the first one, walks out and falls into the second, and if you fill the hole while it is still inside, the enemy is buried for a few seconds - the only way you will ever get the last few bars in a tight corner. Because you fall into your own holes too, every escape route you make can also trap you. The Famicom conversion by Hudson Soft arrived in 1984 and added something the computer originals did not have: a level editor, so players could build and save their own stages. Its 50 stages are laid out as a difficulty curve rather than a random pile, and the late ones are genuinely mathematical.

• ▸Dig-through-floors movement - no jump button exists
• ▸Trap enemies in your own holes and bury them to buy time
• ▸50 Famicom stages arranged as a deliberate difficulty curve
• ▸A built-in level editor, unusual for a 1984 console cartridge