Lunar Lander: Beyond
Last July, Atari announced the latest revival of one of its many classic titles. Lunar Lander: Beyond takes the 1979 Lunar Lander and expands on it in myriad ways, including new visuals, new simulation and exploration mechanics, and a much more involved story. To accomplish this task, Atari tapped Colombian developer Dreams Uncorporated, the studio behind the stunningly gorgeous 2021 throwback RPG Cris Tales, to develop this reimagined classic.
This new version of Lunar Lander incorporates the studio's penchant for creating beautiful hand-drawn visuals, both in its gameplay and cinematics, as you can see in a new trailer released by Atari. In Lunar Lander: Beyond, players can explore 5 different celestial bodies across 30 missions, with various character and ship customization options, procedurally generated characters, and unique attributes.
Check out the trailer below, then read our Q&A with game director Alvaro Martinez and executive producer Jeff Cardenas from Dreams Uncorporated beneath the embedded video!
How did this partnership between Dreams Uncorporated and Atari come into existence? Was Lunar Lander the first game that was planned to be worked on together?
Jeff Cardenas: After releasing Cris Tales, we started talking with Atari, who were fans of the game, and asked how we would approach one of their IPs. Our business development team had heard about the Atari Recharged series, and we’re really big fans of their classic games. It was a great match. We were thinking of different IPs, but during the conversations, we decided Lunar Lander would be an interesting one to work on, adding the narrative and unique gameplay elements we really love. We’ve continued talking about other IPs we’d like to work on. Hopefully, we can see more titles in the future.
When expanding so drastically on a classic game that had very little in the way of story, what does that process look like?
Alvaro Martinez: I’d say that since the original game didn’t have too much of a story,
