#10: Lunar Lander (1979, Atari)

PHYSICS! It's truly a miracle. Today physics is integrated into pretty much every game you can think of. Hell, what would Half-Life 2 be without ridiculous puzzles involving using floating plastic barrels to set up ramps? ...probably a little more enjoyable, really.

But that's not the game we're talking about today. No, today we're talking about Lunar Lander, quite possibly the first physics game. Lunar Lander has you trying to land the titular vehicle on the surface of the moon. In the fictional universe of the game NASA apparently decided to make all its spacecraft out of fine china because unless you land as delicately as possible the lander will explode into a fine mist. Physics!

Similar mechanics to Lunar Lander can be seen in a vast variety of games. One of the most notable is Rare's Solar Jetman, which takes the physics concept and makes a whole adventure game out of it.

The version of Lunar Lander I played was emulated in MAME. If for whatever reason you feel like playing this yourself then it's readily available online - at the Chrome Web Store, for instance, or in HTML5 if you're feeling cutting-edge.

Oh, one more thing - this is the last game on The List from the 1970s! In the next entry we're moving on to the glorious '80s.