Asteroids is an arcade space shooter released in November 1979 by Atari, Inc.
and designed by Lyle Rains, Ed Logg, and Dominic Walsh. The player controls a
spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying
saucers. The object of the game is to shoot and destroy asteroids and saucers
while not colliding with either or being hit by the saucers' counter-fire. The
game becomes harder as the number of asteroids increases.
Asteroids was conceived during a meeting between Logg and Rains and used hardware
developed by Howard Delman previously used for Lunar Lander. Based on an
unfinished game titled Cosmos and inspired by Spacewar! and Computer
Space, both early shoot 'em up video games, Asteroids‍ '​ physics model and
control scheme were derived by Logg from these earlier games and refined through
trial and error. The game is rendered on a vector display in a two-dimensional
view that wraps around in both screen axes.
Acclaimed by players and video game critics for its vector graphics,
controls, and addictive gameplay, Asteroids was one of the first major
hits of the golden age of arcade games. The game sold over 70,000 arcade
cabinets and proved both popular with players and influential with developers.
It has since been ported to multiple platforms. Asteroids was widely imitated
and directly influenced two popular and often cloned arcade games, Defender and
Gravitar, as well as many other video games.
Gameplay The objective of Asteroids is to destroy
asteroids and saucers. The player controls a triangular ship that can
rotate left and right, fire shots straight forward, and thrust forward.
Once the ship begins moving in a direction, it will continue in that
direction for a time without player intervention unless the player applies
thrust in a different direction. The ship eventually comes to a stop when not
thrusting. The player can also send the ship into hyperspace, causing it to
disappear and reappear in a random location on the screen, at the risk of
self-destructing or appearing on top of an asteroid.
Each level starts with a few large asteroids drifting in various directions
on the screen. Objects wrap around screen edges – for instance, an asteroid
that drifts off the top edge of the screen reappears at the bottom and
continues moving in the same direction. As the player shoots asteroids, they
break into smaller asteroids that move faster and are more difficult to hit.
Smaller asteroids are also worth more points. Two flying saucers appear
periodically on the screen; the "big saucer" shoots randomly and poorly,
while the "small saucer" fires frequently at the ship. After reaching a
score of 40,000, only the small saucer appears. As the player's score
increases, the angle range of the shots from the small saucer diminishes until
the saucer fires extremely accurately. Once the screen has been cleared of all
asteroids and flying saucers, a new set of large asteroids appears, thus
starting the next level. The game gets harder as the number of asteroids
increases until after the score reaches a range between 40,000 and 60,000. The
player starts with 3 lives after a coin is inserted and gains an extra life
every 10,000 points. When the player loses all his lives, the game ends.
Like many games of its time, Asteroids contains several bugs. The game slows
down as the player gains 50-100 lives, due to a programming error in that there
is no limit for the permitted number of lives. The player can "lose" the game
after more than 250 lives are collected. Development and design
Asteroids was conceived by Lyle Rains and programmed by Ed Logg with
collaborations from other Atari staff. Logg was impressed with the Atari 2600
and joined Atari's coin-op division and worked on Dirt Bike, which was never
released due to an unsuccessful field test. He developed Super Breakout after
hearing that Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, wanted Breakout updated. Paul
Mancuso joined the development team as Asteroids‍ '​ technician and engineer
Howard Delman contributed to the hardware. During a meeting in April
1979, Rains discussed Planet Grab, a multiplayer arcade game later renamed to
Cosmos. Logg did not know the name of the game, thinking Computer Space as
"the inspiration for the two-dimensional approach." The unfinished game featured
a giant, indestructible asteroid, so Rains asked Logg: "Well, why don’t we
have a game where you shoot the rocks and blow them up?" In response, Logg
described a similar concept where the player selectively shoots at rocks that
break into smaller pieces. Both agreed on the concept.
Asteroids was implemented on hardware developed by Delman and is a vector
game, in which the graphics are composed of lines drawn on a vector monitor.
Rains initially wanted the game done in raster graphics, but Logg, experienced
in vector graphics, suggested an XY monitor because the high image quality
would permit precise aiming. The hardware is chiefly a MOS 6502 executing
the game program, and QuadraScan, a high-resolution vector graphics
processor developed by Atari and referred to as an "XY display system"
and the "Digital Vector Generator". The original design concepts for
QuadraScan came out of Cyan Engineering, Atari's off-campus research lab in Grass
Valley, California, in 1978. Cyan gave it to Delman, who finished the design
and first used it for Lunar Lander. Logg received Delman's modified board with
five buttons, 13 sound effects, and additional RAM, and used it to develop
Asteroids. The size of the board was 4 by 4 inches, and it was "linked up" to a
monitor. Logg modeled the player's ship, the
five-button control scheme, and the game physics after Spacewar!, which he had
played as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, but made several
changes to improve playability. The ship was programmed into the hardware and
rendered by the monitor, and was configured to move with thrust and
inertia. The hyperspace button was not placed near Logg's right thumb, which he
was dissatisfied, as he had a problem "tak[ing] his hand off the thrust
button." Drawings of asteroids in various shapes were incorporated into
the game. Logg copied the idea of a high score table with initials from Exidy's
Star Fire. The two saucers were formulated to be
different from each other. A steadily decreasing timer that shortens intervals
between saucer attacks was employed to keep the player from not shooting
asteroids and saucers. The minimalist soundtrack features a "heartbeat" sound
effect, which quickens as the game progresses. The game did not have a
sound chip, so Delman created a hardware circuit for 13 sound effects by hand
which was wired onto the board. A prototype of Asteroids was well
received by several Atari staff and engineers, who would "wander between
labs, passing comment and stopping to play as they went." Logg was often asked
when he would be leaving by employees eager to play the prototype, so he
created a second prototype specifically for staff to play. Atari went to
Sacramento, California for testing, setting up prototypes of the game in
local arcades to measure its potential success. The company also observed
veteran players and younger players during focus group sessions at Atari
itself. A group of old players familiar with Spacewar! struggled to maintain
grip on the thrust button and requested a joystick, whereas younger players
accustomed to Space Invaders noted they get no break in the game. Logg and other
Atari engineers observed proceedings and documented comments in four pages.
Reception and legacy Asteroids was immediately successful
upon release. It displaced Space Invaders by popularity in the United
States and became Atari's best selling arcade game of all time, with over
70,000 units sold. Atari earned an estimated $150 million in sales from the
game, and arcade operators earned a further $500 million from coin drops.
Atari had been in the process of manufacturing another vector game, Lunar
Lander, but demand for Asteroids was so high "that several hundred Asteroids
games were shipped in Lunar Lander cabinets." Asteroids was so popular that
some video arcade operators had to install large boxes to hold the number
of coins spent by players. The saucer in the original game design
was supposed to take a shot as soon as it appeared. This action was altered so
there would be a delay before the saucer shoots, leading to "lurking" from
players. Lurking is a strategy in which the player uses thrust to keep the ship
in motion, leaves 1 or 2 asteroids undamaged, and hunts for saucers,
allowing the player to pick off as many 1,000-point UFOs as possible and play
indefinitely on a single credit. Since the saucer could only shoot directly at
the player's position on the screen, the player could "hide" at the opposite end
of the screen and shoot across the screen boundary, while remaining
relatively safe. Complaints from operators losing revenue due to lurking
led to the creation of an EPROM restricting such chances. Usage of the
names of Saturday Night Live characters "Mr. Bill" and "Sluggo" to refer to the
saucers in an Esquire article about the game led to Logg receiving a cease and
desist letter from a lawyer with the "Mr. Bill Trademark."
Asteroids received positive reviews from video game critics and has been regarded
as Logg's magnum opus. Brett Alan Weiss, writing for Allgame, likened the
monochrome vector graphics to minimalism and viewed its sound effects as
memorable. Weiss found its overall design to be near-perfect and cites the
intensity and controls as elements that make the game addicting. He admitted the
game is easily understandable and "holds up extremely well over time." William
Cassidy, writing for GameSpy's "Classic Gaming", noticed its innovations,
including being one of the first video games to track initials and allow
players to enter their initials for appearing in the top 10 high scores, and
commented, "the vector graphics fit the futuristic outer space theme very well."
Asteroids was ranked fourth on Retro Gamer‍ '​s list of "Top 25 Arcade
Games"; the Retro Gamer staff cited its simplicity and the lack of a proper
ending as allowances of revisiting the game. It was added to the Museum of
Modern Art's collection of video games. By contrast, in March 1983 the Atari
8-bit port won sixth place in Softline‍ '​s Dog of the Year awards
"for badness in computer games", Atari division, based on reader submissions.
Released in 1981, Asteroids Deluxe is the first sequel to Asteroids. Dave
Shepperd edited the code and made enhancements to the game without Logg's
involvement. The onscreen objects were tinted blue, and hyperspace was replaced
by a shield that depleted if used. The asteroids rotate, and the added killer
satellite enemy breaks apart into three smaller ships when hit that home the
player's position. The arcade machine's monitor displays vector graphics
overlaying a holographic backdrop. It was followed by Owen Rubin's Space Duel
in 1982, featuring colorful geometric shapes and co-op multiplayer gameplay,
and Blasteroids in 1987, in which Ed Rotberg added "power-ups, ship morphing,
branching levels, bosses and the ability to dock your ships in multiplayer for
added firepower." Asteroids: Gunner, released to iOS platforms in 2011, has a
large amount of content as a free-to-play game, with 150 waves,
power-ups, and an achievement system. Asteroids: Outpost, released to Steam
Early Access in 2015, is an open world survival FPS game.
The gameplay in Asteroids was imitated by many games that followed, mostly
"Asteroid clones". By December 1981 BYTE observed that "If imitation is the
sincerest form of flattery, then [Atari's Asteroids has] a lot to be
proud of ... Its popularity has inspired numerous imitations", including eight
for personal computers. The Mattel Intellivision title Astrosmash was
conceived as Avalanche! after Meteor! did not take up the cartridge's entire
ROM space. Meteor!, an Asteroids clone, was cancelled to avoid a lawsuit and
Avalanche! was released as Astrosmash. The resultant game borrows elements from
Asteroids and Space Invaders, both which also influenced Defender and Gravitar,
two popular and often cloned arcade games.Quality Software's Asteroids in
Space, another Asteroids clone, was one of the best selling games for the Apple
II and was voted one of the most popular software titles of 1978-80 by Softalk
magazine. Others include Acornsoft's Meteors, Moons of Jupiter for the
Commodore VIC-20, and MineStorm for the Vectrex.
Ports Asteroids has been ported to multiple
platforms, including much of Atari's hardware and many other platforms.
Released in 1981, the 2600 port was the first game to use bank switching, a
technique developed by Carl Nielsen's group of engineers that increased
available ROM space from 4 KB to 8 KB. Brad Stewart, the programmer tasked to
work on the port, used bank switching to complete the game. A port for the Atari
5200, identical to the Atari 8-bit computer version, was in development in
1982, but was not published. The Atari 7800 version is a launch title and
features co-operative play. The asteroids receive colorful textures, and
the "heartbeat" sound effect remains intact. The game was included as part of
the Atari Lynx title Super Asteroids & Missile Command, and featured in the
original Microsoft Arcade compilation in 1993, the latter with four other Atari
video games: Missile Command, Tempest, Centipede, and Battlezone.
Activision made an enhanced version of Asteroids for PlayStation, Nintendo 64,
Microsoft Windows, and the Game Boy Color in 1998. Doug Perry, writing for
entertainment and video game journalism website IGN, praised the high-end
graphics – with realistic space object models, backgrounds, and special effects
– for making Asteroids "a pleasure to look at" while being a homage to the
original arcade version. The Atari Flashback series of dedicated video game
consoles have included both the 2600 the arcade versions of Asteroids.
Published by Crave Entertainment on December 14, 1999, Asteroids Hyper 64 is
the Nintendo 64 port of Asteroids. The game's graphics were upgraded to 3D,
with both the ship and asteroids receiving polygon models along static
backgrounds, and it was supplemented with weapons and a multiplayer mode. IGN
writer Matt Casamassina was pleased that the gameplay was faithful to the
original but felt the minor additions and constant "repetition" was not enough
to make the port "warrant a $50 purchase." He was disappointed about the
lack of music and found the sound effects to be of poor quality.
In 2001, Infogrames released Atari Anniversary Edition for the Sega
Dreamcast, PlayStation, and PC compatibles. Developed by Digital
Eclipse, it included emulated versions of Asteroids and other old Atari games.
Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot criticized the Dreamcast version for its
limitations, such as the presentation of vector graphics on a low resolution
television set, which obscures the copyright text in Asteroids. The arcade
and Atari 2600 versions of Asteroids, along with Asteroids Deluxe, were
included in Atari Anthology for both Xbox and PlayStation 2.
Released on November 28, 2007, the Xbox Live Arcade port of Asteroids has
revamped HD graphics along with an added intense "throttle monkey" mode. Both
Asteroids in its arcade and 2600 versions and Asteroids Deluxe were
ported to Microsoft‍ '​s Game Room download service in 2010. Glu Mobile
released a mobile phone port of the game with supplementary features as well as
the original arcade version. Asteroids was included on Atari Greatest
Hits Volume 1 for the Nintendo DS. Craig Harris, writing for IGN, noted that the
Nintendo DS's small screen can not properly display details of games with
vector graphics. Perhaps the most strangest port of
Asteroids can be found inside another video game called Wizkid. When a player
reaches the end-of-game monster, instead of fighting against him, player has to
beat his high-score in Asteroids. Highest score
On November 13, 1982, 15-year-old Scott Safran of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, set a
world record of 41,336,440 points on the arcade game Asteroids, beating the
40,101,910 point score set by Leo Daniels of Carolina Beach on February 6,
1982. In 1998, to congratulate Safran on his accomplishment, the Twin Galaxies
Intergalactic Scoreboard searched for him for four years until 2002, when it
was discovered that he had died in an accident in 1989. In a ceremony in
Philadelphia on April 27, 2002, Walter Day of Twin Galaxies presented an award
to the surviving members of Safran's family, commemorating the Asteroid
Champion's achievement. On April 6, 2010, John McAllister broke Safran's
record with a high score of 41,338,740 in a 58-hour Internet livestream.
In other media Asteroids is referenced in the 2015 film
Pixels. = Film adaptation=
In 2009, Universal Studios obtained the rights to adapt Asteroids into a film,
with Matthew Lopez as the scriptwriter and Lorenzo di Bonaventura as the
producer. Universal will create the story from scratch, as done with
Battleship, a film based on the Hasbro board game of the same name.
References External links
Asteroids at the Killer List of Videogames
Asteroids at the Arcade History database Asteroids at Coinop.org
Official online version of Asteroids at Atari
Asteroids at MobyGames Asteroids guide at StrategyWiki
All About Asteroids at Atari Times Article at The Dot Eaters, featuring a
history of Asteroids Edge Magazine The Making Of: Asteroids