LAN-LOK: The Antarctic DOS Sabotage Game Lost for 34 Years (Part 1) - AlphaPixel Software Development

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LAN-LOK: The Antarctic DOS Sabotage Game Lost for 34 Years (Part 1)

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.

May 2025: Now archived and playable in-browser via emulation at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/Lanlok

Introduction

LAN-LOK is a small but remarkable piece of digital history: a DOS game written at<br>Palmer Station, Antarctica in early 1991. Created after the installation of the<br>station’s first peer-to-peer local area network (PalmerLAN), the game captures - through humor,<br>satire, and surprisingly accurate mechanics - the daily realities of early LAN<br>administration in one of the most isolated research communities on Earth.

For more than three decades LAN-LOK remained essentially unknown outside the U.S.<br>Antarctic Program. It never appeared on bulletin boards, never circulated as<br>shareware, and left no trace in public software archives or early web indexes.<br>The only surviving evidence was the executable itself, player score data, and<br>the memories of the people who lived and worked at Palmer and McMurdo Stations<br>during the early 1990s.

AlphaPixel founders Chris and Mindy Hanson worked in McMurdo in the 1994 season, and Chris was exposed to and played LAK-LOK<br>via the InfoSys department's culture. Years later, he discovered a copy of it still<br>intact and archived it for later entertainment. In 2025, while doing file organization on<br>the archives, he noticed it again, and decided to try to recover and run it. He attempted to contact anyone<br>who still remembered it through social media, and failed (outside of the few people he worked with who introduced him to it in McMurdo).<br>Finally, he contacted Al Oxton ("ajo"), the central character-nemesis of LAN-LOK, who confirmed a few of the details.

Though “Evil Al”<br>appears as the antagonist inside the game, Oxton had no role in its development.<br>Instead, he recalls LAN-LOK simply as a popular diversion created by “one of the<br>beakers” (Antarctic slang for research scientists) during the chaotic rollout of the station’s first LAN. The title screen<br>credits the actual authors Mark Chappell and Shane Maloney and provides a<br>precise timestamp: “Developed at Palmer Station, February–March 1991.” February-March is typically station closing<br>at the end of the summer season, so Mark and Shane may have been Palmer winter-over reserchers.

This rediscovery positions LAN-LOK as one of the very few verifiable examples of<br>Antarctic-native-born software: a game written in and shaped entirely by the machines, people, and<br>degraded sanity of a remote research base at the dawn of its digital era. Below, we will document what is known about<br>LAN-LOK, and in later blog posts we may attempt to decompile, update and modernize LAN-LOK straight from the 16-bit<br>DOS execuatble, no source is currently available.

Origins at Palmer Station (February–March 1991)

LAN-LOK was created in a very specific technical and cultural moment at the United States' Palmer Station, Antarctica research station, during the late austral summer or early winter season of 1991. The station had<br>recently deployed its peer-to-peer local area network, referred to at<br>various points as GrapeVine and PalmerLAN. It was in this transitional environment that two researchers Mark Chappell and<br>Shane Maloney developed LAN-LOK. Their names, along with precise creation<br>dates, appear on the game’s startup splash screen:

“by Mark Chappell and Shane Maloney<br>Developed at Palmer Station, February–March 1991.”

Additional confirmation comes from an email reply I received from Al Oxton , one of the Palmer crew<br>and the real-life inspiration for the in-game antagonist “Evil Al.”

Tue, Dec 9, 2025

The game was written at Palmer by one of the beakers about the time we were<br>installing the first peer2peer network. GrapeVine. PalmerLan. The name of<br>the author of the LAN-LOK code is in the startup splash and in the code:<br>"by Mark Chappell and Shane Maloney...Developed at Palmer Station,<br>February-March 1991".<br>The game was popular but that is all the backstorey I can come up with.<br>Some of the names in the PLAYERS copy I have sort of indicate I took the<br>game to McMurdo for my last Winter(s)...