Playing a mini-game in the Windows copy dialog – this is how it works

Want to while away the time copying files with a classic game? No problem! Now you can with a free game for Windows.

Copy Dialog Lunar Lander v1.0

Because while Windows is copying the files and showing the copy dialog on the screen, you can play the classic “Lunar Lander” – directly in the Windows copy dialog. The actually quite boring copy dialog becomes a playing field.

Lunar Lander is an arcade classic where you have to land a lunar lander safely on the given spot. So don’t expect modern game graphics, but you don’t need them anyway for the nice gaming fun in between. Especially since you can choose from two different levels of difficulty (“easy” and “hard”) and different landscapes (green forest, hot desert, ice planet or nuclear devastation), which the developer presents here. The exact difficulty and the displayed landscape also depend on the copy medium. The game also offers other setting options.

Download, install and play

You can download “Copy Dialog Lunar Lander v1.0” for free from Github here. Install the file. Then copy any file and click “More Details” in the copy dialog. Then start the game and the Lunar Lander will fly in from above. Use the left, right and down arrow keys to steer the lunar module so that it doesn’t crash into the hills that now appear in the copy dialog. Restart the game with the spacebar. With each new copying process and the different data such as the size of the file, storage space etc., the game also changes.

Officially only for Windows 10

Developer Sanakan8472 tested “Copy Dialog Lunar Lander v1.0” only on Windows 10 21H2, but not on Windows 11. However, news site Betanews tried the game on the current version of Windows 11 and had no problems with it. If you scroll all the way down here, you will find two known issues listed.