Asteroids (computer game)

Asteroids is a popular vector-based video arcade game released in 1979 by Atari. The object of the game is for the player to shoot and destroy asteroids without being hit by the fragments. It was one of the most popular and influential games of the Golden Age of Arcade Games.

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 and designed 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 another vector beam game,Lunar Lander, but demand for Asteroids was so high they simply converted all production to Asteroids, even disassembling many Lunar Landers in the procee. 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-Scan" 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.

Features

The player's controls consist of thrust and fire buttons, and rotate left/rotate right buttons (actually rotate counterclockwise and rotate clockwise respectively). The momentum of the player's ship is not conserved, and it starts to slow down if thrust is not applied. There is also a hyperspace button, which randomly teleports the player's ship somewhere on the screen, with the risk of exploding upon rematerialization (or rematerializing inside an asteroid).

The player's ship spawns in the middle of the screen, with 4 large asteroids drifting around. Each large asteroid (20 points) breaks into 2 medium-sized ones (50 points) when shot, which in turn breaks into 2 small (100 points) asteroids. The medium and small asteroids, once "spawned", can travel at widely varying speeds. Periodically one of two types of flying saucers ("UFOs") will fly onto the screen: the big one (worth 200 points) shoots in random directions, while the small one (1000 points) attempts to aim at the player. They tend to appear more often when few asteroids remained on the screen and/or the player hasn't shot an asteroid recently.

The screen wraps around, allowing the player's ship, as well as asteroids and shots but not saucers, to fly off the one edge of the screen and reappear on the opposite side. Once a level has been cleared of all asteroids and UFOs, a new set of large asteroids would appear, increasing by 2 each round up to a maximum of 12.

The maximum score possible is 99,990 points, after which it turns back over to zero. A player who desires to get onto the top score list must be careful to shoot just enough asteroids/UFOs to reach this score without going over (including committing suicide with the last ship left to reach the final total!).

On some early versions of the game it was possible to hide the ship in the score area indefinitely without being hit by asteroids.

Since this game is such a major classic and so simple, many Flash games replicate this for the user to play while the actual game loads, such as Bouncy The Ball 2.

Lurking

Soon after the release of Asteroids, some players discovered that small UFOs would be continually sent out when the asteroid count decreased to a certain level. Since these UFOs were worth 1,000 points each - a significant sum on this game - a strategy known as "lurking" soon developed around this. Players would shoot asteroids until there was only one small or mid-sized rock remaining, and then maneuver the ship to a spot approximately one inch from any corner of the screen. Small UFOs would then be ambushed as soon as they emerged (and before they were able to return fire), using wraparound fire if necessary. Because the small UFOs were unable to "lead" the player's ship with their fire (i.e. aiming ahead of the ship's flight path), a clever player could maneuver, if necessary, in such a way as to virtually ensure they would never be hit by the small UFO (in fact the large UFO in a sense was seen as more of a threat precisely because of its unpredictable random shots). Since each 10,000 points awarded an extra life, players could continue almost indefinitely once the practice had been mastered. ^* The designers abolished this practice in Asteroids Deluxe by causing the UFOs to either shoot at the remaining asteroids, thus ending the round, or shoot at the player as soon as they appeared on the screen-they also gained the ability to lead the player's ship as well, making them much more dangerous.

However it was also possible to succeed by shooting the asteroids instead; a shrewd "asteroid hunting" player would typically attempt to kill all the asteroids "inside" a large one before shooting another asteroid, thus minimizing the amount of "clutter" on the screen.

Technical Description

The Asteroids arcade machine is a so-called vector game. This means that the game graphics are composed entirely of lines which are drawn on a vector monitor. The hardware consists primarily of a standard MOS 6502 CPU, which executes the game program, and the Digital Vector Generator (DVG), vector processing circuitry developed by Atari themselves. As the 6502 by itself was too slow to control both the game play and the vector hardware at the same time, the latter task was delegated to the DVG.

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 features various 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 mapped into the CPU address space

The main Asteroids game program uses only 4 KB of ROM code. Another 4 KB 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 100 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. The 2600 port was the first game to utilize a bank-switched cartridge, doubling available ROM space. Also, a new version of Asteroids was developed for PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Windows, and the Game Boy Color in the late 1990s. A port was also included on Atari's Cosmos system, but the system never saw release. 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.

In 2005, Asteroids (Including both the Atari 2600 port and the arcade original, along with Asteroids Deluxe) were included as part of Atari Anthology for both Xbox and Playstation 2, using Digital Eclipse's emulation technology..

Unofficial clones and variants

There have been countless unofficial versions of Asteroids produced. These include near-copies such as Acornsoft's Meteors, as well as those with expanded gameplay and background, such as Stardust and Starscape.

Tony Magro has written a Non-Euclidian Asteroids clone with first-person perspective in 3D. Interestingly the famous space-wrapping in asteroids caused an inconsistency, which he solved with interesting consequences: Non-Euclidian asteroids

Nowadays, hundreds of different Asteroids clones and variants can be found on the web, as it is a popular game for beginning programmers to attempt.

Record breaking gameplay

On November 13, 1982, 15-year-old Scott Safran, of Cherry Hill, NJ, set a world record of 41,336,440 points on the classic arcade game Asteroids. He beat the 40,101,910 point score set by Leo Daniels of Carolina Beach on February 6, 1982. To congratulate Safran on his accomplishment, the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard searched for him for more than fifteen years, until 2002, when it was discovered that he died in an accident in 1989. In a special ceremony in Philadelphia on April 27, 2002, Walter Day of Twin Galaxies presented a special award to the surviving members of Scott Safran's family, commemorating the Asteroid Champion's achievement.

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.

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.

External links

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