Moondust is a 1983 generative music video game created for the Commodore 64

Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...

 by virtual reality

Virtual reality

Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...

 pioneer, Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier

Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist, best known for popularizing the term virtual reality .A pioneer in the field of VR, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves...

. Moondust was programmed in 6502 assembly

MOS Technology 6502

The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, it was the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin, costing less than one-sixth the price of...

 in 1982, and is widely considered the first art video game.

Summary

Moondust is also considered to be the first interactive music publication

Music video game

A music video game, also commonly known as a music game, is a video game where the gameplay is meaningfully and often almost entirely oriented around the player's interactions with a musical score or individual songs...

, and it sold quite successfully. With the profits from Moondust and additional funding from Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.-Biography:...

, Lanier formed VPL which would later go on to create the DataGlove and the DataSuit and to become one of the primary innovators of virtual-reality research and development throughout the 1980s.

Moondusts gameplay is characterized by graphical complexity, and the game features an abstract ambient score. The goal of the game is to guide a spaceman

Astronaut

An astronaut or cosmonaut is a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command, pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft....

 around the screen creating strange patterns and getting bullet-shaped spaceship

Spacecraft

A spacecraft or spaceship is a craft or machine designed for spaceflight. Spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including communications, earth observation, meteorology, navigation, planetary exploration and transportation of humans and cargo....

s to pass through the trails that the spaceman creates. The in-game scoring system assigns point-values according to an algorithm. The game has been compared to the works of Jeff Minter

Jeff Minter

Jeff 'Yak' Minter is a British computer/video game designer and programmer. He is the founder of software house Llamasoft and his recent works include Neon , a non-game music visualization program that has been built into the Xbox 360 console, and the video games Space Giraffe , and Space Invaders...

.

Additionally, Moondust has frequently been used as an art installation piece in museums, and by Lanier and others in papers and lectures as an example to demonstrate the unexpected ephemerality of digital data.