1984 · First Star Software
Boulder Dash
Dig for diamonds as Rockford — and remember that every tunnel you carve can bring a boulder down on your head. Peter Liepa's physics-puzzle masterpiece.
- Year
- 1984
- Genre
- Puzzle action
- Original
- Atari 8-bit
- Author
- Peter Liepa
Written by Canadian programmer Peter Liepa with Chris Gray and published by First Star Software in 1984, Boulder Dash put you inside the earth itself. As Rockford, you tunnel through dirt collecting diamonds — but every boulder you undermine obeys the game's simple, ruthless physics, and one wrong dig sends it straight down onto your head.
That physics system is the whole genius of the game. The caves are not obstacle courses but puzzles: which diamond to take first, which boulder to release deliberately, how to lure the fireflies and butterflies into a crush that showers you with gems. Add a hard time limit, and every cave becomes a race between careful planning and pure panic.
Born on the Atari 8-bit computers, Boulder Dash spread to virtually every platform of the era and achieved something almost unheard of: a home-computer game so popular it was licensed into the arcades, reversing the usual direction entirely. Its cave-digging DNA lives on in games from Repton to Spelunky.
The browser version linked below is the official web release at boulder-dash.com, made for web browsers on desktop computers — a perfect fit for this catalogue of one-click retro classics. It needs a keyboard, so it cannot be played on phones or tablets.