LAN-LOK: The Antarctic DOS Sabotage Game Lost for 34 Years
LAN-LOK is a DOS game created in 1991 at Palmer Station, Antarctica, and has recently been revived for public play. The game humorously reflects the challenges of early LAN administration in a remote research environment. After being lost for over three decades, it is now accessible online through emulation.
- ▪LAN-LOK was developed by Mark Chappell and Shane Maloney during the installation of the first local area network at Palmer Station.
- ▪The game remained largely unknown outside the U.S. Antarctic Program until its recent revival.
- ▪AlphaPixel has archived the game, making it playable in-browser via Archive.org.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
By Chris HansonPosted on May 13, 2026 https://alphapixeldev.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/lanlok_001.mp4 LAN-LOK: The Antarctic DOS Sabotage Game Lost for 34 Years (Part 1) An exercise in reconstructing (and maybe modernizing) history. AlphaPixel often gets called upon to work on legacy codebases, sometimes VERY legacy. We have contact with code from the 80s and 90s on a regular basis, in a variety of dialects and languages, and stored and archived in various difficult containers and mediums. While NDAs and confidentiality mean we often can’t talk about our paid projects, we recently had an interesting side project that used the same processes, only it was all for fun, so we can talk all about it. The task: Revive the only known Antarctic-native game, LAN-LOK.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at AlphaPixel Software Development.
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