Boulder Dash Today
How a 1986 level editor created a fan community that never stopped making caves, and how the 2014 revival brought Rockford back to mainstream platforms.
Boulder Dash Fan Community: Forty Years of Custom Caves ACTIVE
The Boulder Dash fan community is one of the longest-running of any retro game. Organised around the boulder-dash.nl forum, the community maintains an open-source engine (BoulderCaves+) that runs custom caves built with the Construction Kit format, supports browser-based and native play, and archives thousands of fan-made cave packs.
The community has been active since the bulletin board era of the 1980s, when caves were shared as files on dial-up BBSs. The transition to the internet gave the community a permanent home. The BoulderCaves+ engine represents an unbroken chain of fan creativity running from the original Construction Kit's release in 1986 to the present day.
Peter Liepa himself noted in a 2015 interview that the Boulder Dash community was "the one that I'm most impressed by." He described the fan work as truly keeping the game alive through the years when First Star had gone quiet.
Boulder Dash 30th Anniversary (Steam) COMPLETE
In 2014, BBG Entertainment GmbH - working with First Star Software's blessing - released Boulder Dash 30th Anniversary on Steam, iOS, and Android. The release coincided with the franchise's 30th year and included:
- Faithful recreations of the original 16 caves from Boulder Dash (1984)
- New cave content designed for modern audiences
- Updated visual presentation while preserving the core physics
- New music alongside Peter Liepa's original SID compositions (adapted)
- A cave pack by Peter Liepa himself - his first new cave design work in 30 years
Liepa spent approximately a month designing the 20 caves for his contribution. He described the creative process as the same as 1983: place elements at random, play until patterns emerge, bicycle until ideas arrive. The cave pack was his reconnection with the system he built four decades earlier.
The 30th Anniversary is available on Steam. For play options, see the Play page.
Speedrunning ACTIVE
The original C64 version of Boulder Dash has an active speedrunning community tracked at speedrun.com. Boulder Dash speedrunning reveals optimal cave completion routes that bear no resemblance to how casual players approach the game - precise movement sequences that exploit the physics deterministically to collect the minimum required diamonds in minimum time.
NES Boulder Dash also has Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS) records. See the Videos page for a TAS playthrough of the NES version.
Fan Remakes and Spiritual Successors WIP
The Boulder Dash design has inspired many unofficial ports and remakes over the decades. Notable examples include an Atari 2600 version - a platform Liepa noted was "truly an amazing thing" to program on given its hardware constraints - and a 10-line BASIC version for the Atari created for an annual programming contest. Liepa himself participated in a JavaScript game jam, noting that the core of Boulder Dash can be implemented in under 1,024 characters.
The cellular automaton model that Liepa invented has been reimplemented in nearly every programming language and on every platform. Most of these are educational or fan projects, but they reflect the game's status as a clear, implementable system that programmers study as an example of emergent complexity from simple rules.