I made a rocket game. It’s called Long Road to Mars and you can play it free in the browser at apn201.itch.io/lrtm.
It started as a Lunar Lander tribute. The 1979 arcade game is one of those things that should not still work and somehow does. Side-on physics, fuel anxiety, the urge to swear at gravity. I wanted to see if I could build the same feeling in HTML5.
Somewhere along the way the game became something else. I had been watching Starship test flights on YouTube for years, and the progression of those flights mapped uncannily well onto a sequence of lunar-lander missions. Low hops. Cylindrical hops. Bellyflops. Recoveries that mostly didn’t. So I started writing missions that quietly retold that history. Names lightly changed. The timeline not.
The finished game has 28 missions. You start on day one with a water tower welded to a single engine. You end on Mars. Between those two points is a lot of crashing.
What’s in there
- 28 hand-built missions covering low hops, cylinder hops, full test flights, orbital missions, the Moon, Mars
- Year-by-year mission briefings with physics lessons in the early levels
- A daily challenge with a local streak counter
- An Astro Rich List you climb by completing missions, populated by people whose names you may almost recognise
- A Squitter Battle minigame, because I needed to vent
- Hidden cheats, easter eggs, and an end demo for the patient
- Save progress between sessions
- Music and sound effects from the era they belong to
Physics are realistic-ich. Easier than Kerbal Space Program. The first level walks you through the basics. The later ones don’t.
How it’s built
Vanilla JavaScript. HTML5 canvas. SVG for the art. No frameworks, no build step, no bundler. The whole thing runs out of a folder of plain files. The repo also still has an Electron wrapper in case I want a desktop build later, but the web version is the one I’m shipping today.
About a year of evenings, on and off.
Try it
Free to play. Donations enabled if you want, no pressure.
If you find a bug or get stuck on a mission, tell me. There’s a comments section on the itch.io page and the contact details for APN201 are in the footer.
Hope to see you on Mars.
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