Boulder Dash (Classic)

About

Boulder Dash is the game everything started with. When First Star Software published it in 1984, they could not have realized how revolutionary a game they brought to the market. For the game rules were simple and the graphics weren't particularly beautiful. Many sequels followed. And after a short time, also the clones appeared, of which some have become a golden classic as well. Examples of them are Emerald Mine, Repton and Supaplex.

The reason for such a great success is the originality of the game and its addictive effect, which attracted many players. The idea of combining logic with quick reflexes appealed to beginners as well as the hardcore players and because it didn't have any typical male or female elements (which was the case in a racing or a barbie dressing game) people of both sexes played it. Besides, in that time, the people were not used to the spectacular 3D games we nowadays have.

Chris Gray (also spelled as 'Grey') and Peter Liepa are the creators of this successful game. In an interview Peter said that the name 'Boulder Dash' comes from the English word 'balderdash' and was invented by himself after having had some working titles like 'Cavern Raider' and 'Cavern Crystals'. The game idea itself was inspired by the arcade game 'The Pit'.

The games in the Boulder Dash series have been published on different platforms: Amiga, Amstrad, Apple II, Atari 8 bit, Atari ST, BBC/Electron, Commodore 64/128, Coin-Operated Arcades, Fujitsu, Game Boy, IBM (PC), MSX, NEC, Nintendo Family Computer, Nintendo Entertainment System and (ZX) Spectrum. One of the best known versions is the Commodore 64 version.

There were more than one publishers of Boulder Dash and the official sequels by First Star Software in the Commodore 64 time, such as First Star Software itself, Ozisoft, Playsoft, Aackosoft, etc. Another publisher was Statesoft, which also printed leaflets with information about the games. Mister Creepy has typed out some leaflet information. Download a Microsoft Word document with the Boulder Dash Cave Names & Descriptions. It contains the names and descriptions for Boulder Dash I and Boulder Dash III.

Rockford is the name of the main character in this popular game. His goal is to collect a required number of diamonds in order to open the exit and leave the level through it. He digs around in dangerous subterranean world with evil butterflies, hungry slime and smashing boulders.

To create your own levels, you can use the Boulder Dash Construction Kit. It was released two years after Boulder Dash. Many players have created their own Boulder Dash games (I sometimes call them 'levelsets', but in fact they are standalone games) with it and you can download them further on this page.

History

For the complete history of Boulder Dash, have a look at the main page in the History section.

Download

Because the Boulder Dash series is still licensed (there are still even Boulder Dash games being made at the moment), I cannot provide the downloads of them. No less than that, I can give you a complete list of the series below with all the platforms on which each part of the series was released:


All the other games that look as if they are part of the series (such as Boulder Dash III Classic, Boulder Dash 04, etc.) have been created by others and are officially no part of the official Boulder Dash series by First Star Software. They can be downloaded below, in the 'levels' section.

The modern parts of the Boulder Dash series (from about the year 2000 and later) are not displayed on this page, but can be found among the other games on this website. My reason for this is that they don't really belong to the 'classic' Boulder Dash; they are far too different from the game it all started with. This special page is about the classic game and not about modern adaptations (even if they have been created by First Star Software).

Screenshots

Click on the screenshots below to enlarge them. They come from different games from the series.


There are more screenshots available. All the original C64 Boulderdash games that are also available in the Boulder Dash Common File Format (BDCFF, see the Levels section for more information) can be loaded in the Windows tool 'BDCFF to BMP Converter' by Arno Weber (which can be found in the Tools & Utilities section) and then you can let the program create screenshots of all the caves (levels). It puts all the created images including some information about the cave properties (such as how much time you have to finish a cave) on an HTML page.

The screenshots that have been created with the BDCFF to BMP Converter are listed below. They are *.png files and not *.bmp files. (The BDCFF to BMP Converter can also make *.gif and *.png images.) The packages with them (the downloads) also include the HTML files.

Because I only have a limited number of BDCFF files (see the Levels section for an explanation) I can't provide screenshots of all the C64 Boulderdash games, but only the screenshots of the games that have been converted to *.bd files (BDCFF files). But you can find a few more game names here than in the BDCFF games table in the Levels section, as the screenshots of Boulder Dash games by First Star Software aren't copyrighted as far as I know, in contrast with the game files themselves.

Emulators

Boulder Dash is an old game and it can be played on various old computers, such as the Commodore 64 and the Atari 8-bit computers. This means that many people who want to play a game from the Boulder Dash series (see Download section) or an additional Boulderdash game (for a complete list, see the Levels section) have a problem, as these games don't work on your modern PC with Windows or Linux installed on it. Those who have just downloaded a game file and double click on it, will get an error message.

Fortunately there is a solution: emulators! Emulators are programs that try to imitate another or an obsolete computer system in an own or in a new environment. In other words: they make it possible to play old Commodore 64 games in Windows!

Below you can download emulators for the computer systems that are mentioned in the Levels section. The list is not complete, as I don't want to put all the good and bad emulators here. The ones below are the easiest ones to use with the best performance and work in Windows XP. And of course, they are all freeware. We don't want more, do we?

Levels

Since the coming of the Boulder Dash Construction Kit in 1986, the players could create their own levels and convert this to a standalone application on a game disk. Many people have created their own 'games' (levelsets). In this section you can download them. Beware that the names they are listed with on this page are their official names as mentioned on the title screens, which you see when you play them. (Except if one 'game' in a series has another name than another 'game' in the series. In such cases I made a decision which variant of them I would display.) Sometimes they can differ from the file name (e.g. 'Boulderdash V' has 'Boulder Dash 05' in its file name).

Because the Boulder Dash Construction Kit was released on different platforms, not all the levels could be played on e.g. the Commodore 64 computer. Therefore, the games (levelsets) below are sorted by platform. Only the 'Boulder Dash Common File Format (BDCFF)' is not a platform. Read more about it below (especially if you don't know what 'BDCFF' is).

All the essential information about the games (the year of publishing, the author name and short descriptions or notes) can be found in the download tables below. And many screenshots can be downloaded in the Screenshots section. But on Firefox's site (Firefox is a well-known person in the Boulder Dash world), there are some reviews of Boulderdash games available. There you can find some screenshots and a description, which is sometimes nice to read.

If you don't have an old computer to play the games below on, you could try an emulator. More information about this can be found in the Emulators section.  

Remember that there are some C64 Boulderdash games that were not designed with the Boulder Dash Construction Kit or a comparable tool, like the game '20 Tons' by 64 Tape Computing or 'Cave-Guennie' by Game One / CP Verlag. Those games are not listed below, as they have nothing especially more to do with the classic Boulder Dash than e.g. Boulderdash clones for Windows. So they don't belong to this page.

I don't provide levelsets with occult, pornographic or other offending titles or things inside them, because this site is meant for everyone. Those levelsets are marked as 'not family-friendly'. Nor do I provide a download for the official Boulder Dash games by First Star Software, as they are copyrighted. But you can see the complete list of their games in the Download section.


The BDCFF is a sort of list with rules behind a level file for all the objects from Boulder Dash and some popular clones. This makes it possible to use these files (which are games or 'levelsets' if you want) not for only one game, but for several games that support the BDCFF. However, it has not been finished yet and there aren't any Boulderdash clones that support it either. The only thing you can currently do with them is viewing them with the BD Viewer and converting them to *.bmp files with the BDCFF to BMP Converter (see the Tools & Utilities section to download both of them.) But the main part of it is ready and therefore the BDCFF files can already be created without real danger that they will be useless in the future when the BDCFF has been developed in a different way which would possibly break the 'rules' of the older versions of the file format.

More information about the BDCFF can be found on the Fan Stuff page in the Programming section. As the BDCFF files are just conversions, you can find them on this page, but the rest about the BDCFF fits on the Fan Stuff page in my opinion.

Below you can find the Boulderdash games (levelsets) that have been converted to the Boulder Dash Common File Format (*.bd files). Unfortunately I can't provide all the games yet, as I don't have the conversion tool (for MS DOS) to do this myself. That tool is only available to a limited number of people who try it out, as it's still in an early alpha stage of development and is still a bit buggy. I am not one of the testers, so everything I can do is provide you the games that have been converted by one of the testing people of this tool.


 

Here are the Atari 8-Bit disks. The Boulderdash games are on disks with more than one game. I've tried to copy them all to a loose disk, but many games failed for somehow reason. So I decided to provide the complete disks here. They often include non-Boulderdash games as well. Remember that the disk numbers are not always logical and that many numbers are missing. That is because the disks come from a big Atari 8-Bit games archive and many of those disks contain non-Boulderdash games, which are not listed below. But the list below is complete as far as I know.

And one other note: Boulder Dash I-III by First Star Software cannot be found in the list below (just as I did in the Commodore 64 section below), because they are copyrighted.