Moondust
About
Moondust is a 1983 generative music video game created for the Commodore 64 by virtual reality pioneer, Jaron Lanier. Moondust was programmed in 6502 assembly in 1982, and is considered the first art video game. Moondust has frequently been used as an art installation piece in museum exhibitions from Corcoran Gallery of Art's 1983 "ARTcade" to the Smithsonian's 2012 "The Art of Video Games". It has also been used by Lanier and others in papers and lectures as an example to demonstrate the unexpected ephemerality of digital data.
Moondust is also considered to be the first interactive music publication, and it sold quite successfully. With the profits from Moondust and additional funding from Marvin Minsky, Lanier formed VPL which would later go on to create the DataGlove and the DataSuit and to become one of the primary innovators of virtual-reality research and development throughout the 1980s.