Gold Runner '94 – free retro dig-and-escape platformer

How to play

1. Collect all the gold. Walk, climb ladders and swing hand-over-hand along ropes to reach every gold bar. The Gold Remaining counter in the top bar shows how many are left.
2. Dig to survive. You cannot jump, but you carry a brick-blaster. Blast a hole diagonally down-left or down-right to open a trap. Guards that fall in are stunned for a few seconds.
3. Watch the clock on every hole. Holes refill by themselves. A refilling hole crushes whoever is inside it, including you.
4. Escape. When the last gold bar is collected the hidden escape ladders appear and flash. Climb one past the top row to finish the level and bank your time bonus.

Controls

On touch devices open the gear menu to change button size and opacity, switch to left-handed mode, go fullscreen, or choose Move buttons and drag the d-pad and dig buttons to wherever your thumbs are most comfortable. Positions are remembered separately for portrait and landscape.

The rules in detail

Movement and falling

There is no jump. Step off a ledge and you drop straight down until you land on a floor, a ladder or a rope. Ropes let you travel sideways while hanging; let go by moving down. Dark grey bedrock blocks cannot be dug and form the outer wall of every level.

Digging

You can only dig a regular blue brick that has an empty space directly above it, and only while standing on solid ground or a ladder rather than hanging from a rope. A guard standing in the target space blocks the shot. Dug bricks flash with a short regrowth animation in the last second before they close.

Guards

Guards use a shortest-path search to chase you across ladders, ropes and drops, so they will find the quickest route rather than just walking toward you. They also pick up loose gold and carry it for a while before dropping it again, which means a guard can quietly steal a bar you were planning to collect. Make a guard fall into a hole and it releases its gold, which reappears on the floor above the hole.

A trapped guard climbs out after the stun time ends. If the hole refills first, the guard is crushed and respawns blinking on the top row, harmless for about one second.

Winning and losing

Collect all gold to reveal the escape ladders. You lose a life if a guard touches you or if a hole closes on top of you. When you run out of lives the game ends and your score is added to the local top-10 table.

Easy, Normal and Hard

You can change difficulty and pick any start level from the main menu before each run.

Scoring

• 250 points for every gold bar you collect.
• 75 points each time a guard falls into one of your holes, and another 75 if the hole later crushes it.
• 1,000 point level bonus plus up to 2,000 speed bonus that shrinks by 10 points for every second you spend in the level.
• Extra life at every 10,000 points.

Your top 10 scores, with level reached and difficulty, are kept on your device and shown on the High Scores screen from the main menu.

Strategy tips from the level designer

• Trap first, collect second. A guard sitting in a hole is a guard that cannot steal gold or block a ladder. Spend the first seconds of a level setting one trap near the spawn point.
• Dig where you will not need to walk. Never open the only floor between you and the escape ladder unless you can finish crossing before it refills.
• Use guards as stepping stones. A trapped guard fills the hole beneath you, letting you walk across the top of the pit while the guard is stunned.
• Count in guards, not seconds. On Hard, dig, wait for the guard to fall, then leave immediately. Hesitation is how most lives are lost.
• Drop from ropes to dodge. Guards must take the long way around when you let go of a rope onto a lower floor.
• Look for the escape ladder early. Its position is hidden, but the top row is always where it ends, so plan a route to the upper floors while you collect.
• Chase the speed bonus last. On a new level, play safe to learn it, then replay from the menu to cut seconds and push your best score up.

About the 50 levels

Level 1 and level 2 are hand-crafted layouts that introduce ladders, ropes and the escape ladder. The remaining 48 levels are produced by a seeded level generator, so every player gets the same levels in the same order. The early levels have two or three ladders per floor and a handful of gold bars. Later levels add extra floors, rope bridges across gaps, bedrock patches that cannot be dug, more gold and up to five guards.

Every generated level is run through an automatic solver before it ships. The solver checks that all gold is reachable from the start, that an escape ladder exists, and that from every spot you can reach, an escape ladder is still reachable once the level is complete. Unsolvable layouts are thrown away and regenerated, so there are no dead ends that force a restart.

About this game

Dig-and-run platformers were a popular genre on early home computers and DOS PCs, led by the 1983 classic Lode Runner. Gold Runner '94 is an independent tribute to that style. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or derived from any commercial title. All graphics are drawn in code with plain HTML5 canvas, all sound is synthesized on the fly with the Web Audio API, and the page loads no external images, fonts or audio files, so it starts quickly and works offline once loaded.

The look follows a classic high-contrast DOS palette: pure black background, steel-blue bricks with cyan mortar, grey bedrock, white stick-figure runner, red guards and yellow gold. Press C or use the settings menu to switch on a CRT scanline filter for extra nostalgia.

Frequently asked questions