Description

Asteroids was inspired, in a roundabout way, by the seminal Spacewar, the first computer-based video game. In the early 1980s a stand-up arcade game version was produced as Space Wars, which included a number of optional versions and added a floating asteroid as a visual device. Asteroids is essentially a one-player version of Spacewar, featuring the "wedge" ship from the original and promoting the asteroids to be the main opponent.

The game was conceived by Lyle Rains and programmed by Ed Logg. Asteroids was a hit in the United States and became one of Atari's best selling games of all time. Atari had been in the process of releasing a vector beam version of Lunar Lander, but demand for Asteroids was so high they simply pulled them apart and converted them over. Today the Lunar Lander version is difficult to find. Asteroids was so popular that video arcade owners usually had to install larger boxes to hold all the coins this machine raked in.

One feature of the game was the ability for players to record their initials with their high scores, an innovation which is standard in arcade games to this day.

Asteroids was the first of several games to use Atari's "Quadra-Market scanner" vector-refresh system (although a raster-based full-color version was developed for the Atari 2600 home video game system). Later full-color Quadra-Scan games would include Tempest.

Technical Description
The Asteroids arcade machine is a so-called vector game. This means that the game graphics are only made up of lines which are drawn on a vector monitor. The hardware essentially consists of a standard 6502 CPU, which executes the game program, and of the Digital Vector Generator (DVG), vector processing circuitry developed by Atari. The CPU by itself would be too slow to control the game play and the vector hardware at the same time. That is the reason for the usage of the DVG for drawing the graphics. For each picture frame, the 6502 writes graphics commands for the DVG into a defined area of RAM (the vector RAM), and then asks the DVG to draw the corresponding vector image on the screen. The DVG reads the commands and generates appropriate signals for the vector monitor. There are DVG commands for positioning the cathode ray, for drawing a line to a specified destination, calling a subroutine with further commands, and so on.

Asteroids also has some cool sound effects, each of which is implemented by its own circuitry. The CPU activates these audio circuits (and other hardware components) by writing to special memory addresses (memory mapped ports). The inputs from the player's controls (buttons) are also made available to the CPU on such memory mapped ports.

The Asteroids game program uses only four kibibytes of ROM. Another four kibibytes of vector ROM contain the descriptions of the main graphical elements (rocks, saucer, player's ship, explosion pictures, letters, and digits) in the form of DVG commands.

Legacy
The gameplay in Asteroids was imitated by many games that followed. For example, one of the objects of Sinistar is to shoot asteroids in order to get them to release resources which the player needs to collect.

Due to its success, Asteroids was followed by three sequels: Asteroids Deluxe (1980) Space Duel (1982) Blasteroids (1987)

However, the original game was by far the most popular of the series.

The Killer List of Videogames (KLOV) credits this game as one of the "Top One c Videogames." Readers of the KLOV credit it as the seventh most popular game.

Ports
Being one of the most popular video games ever, Asteroids has been ported to multiple systems, including many of Atari's systems (Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, Atari Lynx) and many others. Also, a new version of Asteroids was developed for PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Windows, and the Game Boy Color in the late 1990s. Many of the recent TV Games series of old Atari games have included either the 2600 or arcade versions of Asteroids. Atari has also used the game for its other late '90s anthology series. Essentially, if one looks for this game, one will be able to find it somewhere.

Record breaking gameplay
In March 2004, Portland, Oregon resident Bill Carlton attempted to break the world record for playing an arcade version of Asteroids, playing over 27 hours before his machine malfunctioned, ending his record run. He scored 12.7 million points, putting him in 5th place in the all-time Asteroids rankings. In November 1982 Scott Safran set the still unbroken record of 41 million points.

Song
In 1982, Buckner and Garcia recorded a song titled "Hyperspace", using sound effects from the game, and released it on the album Pac-Man Fever.