When Kong was ported to the VAX, some Pascal sections were mixed into the original Fortran code. The game was programmed in Fortran using ASCII character graphics. Kong was soon ported to VAX minicomputers, which had more terminals available on campus. Kong was written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer limited to one building on the UW campus. Bratsanos later left the project to pursue his studies, and Smith continued to develop Kong into the prototype of what later became Lode Runner.

Following the release of Nintendo's arcade platformer Donkey Kong that year, the three students began working on a program called Kong, which evolved the concepts of Suicide. Īt the University of Washington in 1981, Bratsanos met two other students, architecture student Douglas E. This novel design later evolved into the concept of a level editor. Due to his lack of programming experience, there were no pre-programmed levels, but he instead built 'an engine that could interpret a game level and then run a processing loop on the monsters'. He began writing a Commodore PET program called Suicide, using simple text-based graphics. Bratsanos was intrigued by his friend's description of the concept, and wanted to develop it further. Around late 1980, high school student James Bratsanos heard from a friend about a new arcade video game, Space Panic by Universal, which involves climbing platforms and ladders while digging holes to trap monsters.

Lode runner legend returns controls