Playable Project

Revere's Ride: Lantern Run

The midnight ride of 18 April 1775, as an oil painting you can gallop through.

Play Lantern Run Watch the trailer Open the field guide
The trailer. One minute, cut from real gameplay, from the Old North Church to the Moon.
Stages
19 painted roads in 4 acts
Riders
6 real riders of the Revolution
Secrets
13 colony lanterns, 5 horseshoes
Paint
Every backdrop in oils on the easel

The midnight ride, as a moving oil painting

RevereBike was an 8-bit Excitebike with horses. Lantern Run keeps its heart (the gallop, the turbo, the heat meter, the jumps, the music and the sound effects) and rebuilds everything else. The road now has three lanes. Every backdrop is an oil painting made on the easel, the same one that painted the Delft-blue seascape in this site's footer. In front of it, the horse, the riders, the houses and the soldiers are Blender models, rigged and animated, and drawn through an oil-paint filter so they sit inside the painting instead of on top of it.

The story follows the real night of 18 April 1775, road by road: the lanterns in the Old North Church, the officers at Charlestown Neck, the houses of Menotomy, the bell at Lexington, Prescott's jump over the wall, and dawn on the green. Then it follows the war to Yorktown and the Fourth in Philadelphia. The silly bonus stages from the original are back too, from the Moon to the Sun to a dinosaur dash.

What is new

  • The Call. A button to shout with. Wake a house and a minuteman joins you. Ring a belfry and the whole road wakes. Fill the Spirit lantern and Call to fire a Lantern Burst.
  • Lanes, crews and rivals. Change lanes to dodge volleys and broadsides. Your crew rides beside you. Dragoons patrol ahead and chase from behind, and a turbo pass takes them down.
  • Set pieces. Bridges that fall in behind you, cannons that throw you down the road, ice floes on the Delaware, a steam train to race, parade floats, saucers and asteroids.
  • Progress. Three stars on every stage, a painted map of 1775, six riders with perks, horses that level up, a saddler, and thirteen hidden colony lanterns that open a secret road.
  • When in doubt, Fast and the Furious. A camera director cuts to dollies, hoof-level tracks, cranes and slow-motion orbits for the big moments, with letterbox bars, motion streaks and a whip pan back to the side view.

On the road

A high crane shot over Breed's Hill: Revere gallops across red earth past rail fences, with long shadows from the fires.
Breed's Hill. The crane shot for big air.
A close tracking shot of a rider on the snowy bank of the Delaware, a stone wall and pines behind.
The Delaware crossing. Snow, ice, and a long way to the ferry.
Revere waves his hat on the Concord road in spring while a dragoon gallops up behind him, with a stone wall and green fields beside the road.
Concord in spring. The dragoon behind wants the road. Pass him on turbo for the takedown.
The side view of the Lexington stage at night: Revere gallops past a lantern post and a fence, with painted houses on the horizon.
Lexington, the side view you play from.
Rainbow Road from a high crane: a white unicorn gallops along a road striped in every color, coins and stars ahead.
Rainbow Road, for anyone with all thirteen lanterns.
The Moon Map: a rider in a tricorn gallops across grey moondust between scattered moon rocks.
Moon Map. Low gravity, long jumps.

Act I, the night of the ride

The field guide covers every stage, the real people of the ride, the horses, the secrets and how to play.

Build notes

Read the original build story, first published on October 20, 2026.

Read the design notes and the changelog.

Painted on the easel. Each stage backdrop is a 4800 by 1200 pixel panorama painted stroke by stroke in simulated oils, from a Lua script per stage. The skies, clouds, towns, steeples, water and fire share one kit of painting recipes, so all nineteen read as one set. The Lua sources ship with the game, so any of them can be repainted.

Built in Blender. The horse is a rigged animal from the 3D library, given a mane, a tail, tack and new jump, land and skid poses on top of its walk, gallop, rear and fall. The riders are rigged characters from two packs, recolored into Revere, Dawes, Prescott, Sybil, Redcoats and militia, with thirteen new animations authored with two-bone inverse kinematics so their hands find the reins and their feet find the stirrups. About 87 stage pieces, from saltbox houses and the Old North Church to a locomotive, saucers and dinosaurs, were modelled or kitbashed and painted with region codes so the shader knows a window from a flame.

Painterly rendering. Every model is lit in a few value bands with cool shadows and warm lights, textured with a brush-stroke map, and run through a Kuwahara filter, which flattens detail into paint-like patches. Bloom, a canvas weave and a vignette finish the frame. The effects come from the Prism Forge VFX pack, with dust, sparks, snow, embers, leaves and candy drawn as painted dabs.

The trailer. Every shot is real gameplay, rendered frame by frame from the game on autopilot with its own camera director, then cut to the beat of an original track. The music, the narrator and the sound effects were made with ElevenLabs.

The sound of the original. The eleven music tracks and the synth sound effects of RevereBike play here unchanged, with a few new ones for bells, volleys, cannons, splashes and the Call.