The little wedge-shaped spaceship thrusts and drifts across the screen, firing at dangerous obstacles around it. The two-note soundtrack gradually increases its pace, growing more suspenseful. Despite firing at the objects around it, the spaceship is now surrounded by more objects than when it began. A button press sends the spaceship into hyperspace, narrowly avoiding a collision, but the spaceship randomly reappears somewhere just as dangerous, and is destroyed by a passing asteroid. Game over.
Designed by Atari’s Lyle Rains and Ed Logg, the arcade game Asteroids was released in November 1979, and went on to become Atari’s most popular arcade game. The spaceship and the floating asteroids are all simple forms of a few white lines set on a background of black, but the thrilling gameplay was enough to get players to spend quarter after quarter; in 1981 alone, Americans put 20 billion quarters through arcade games, playing 75,000 man-hours on them. Two aspects of Asteroids – its wraparound screen and the way asteroids are destroyed – helped make the game a stunning success. The idea of a ‘wraparound’ screen had been around since Spacewar! (1962). Objects leaving the top of the screen re-entered from the bottom of the screen, and vice versa; likewise, objects passing out of the left side of the screen would re-enter on the right, and vice versa. Before Asteroids, however, player vehicles and missiles were the only things passing in and out of the screen boundaries. In Asteroids, the number of objects moving on-screen and off-screen is far greater, and can even be in the dozens. This is due to the way the asteroids are destroyed: players start the game with a handful of large asteroids floating around the screen, and shooting at them breaks the large asteroid into two medium-sized asteroids. When fired upon, each medium-sized asteroid explodes into two smaller ones. Only the smallest asteroids, when hit, will vanish completely and the smaller the asteroid, the harder it is to hit.
Players needed to learn how to fly their spaceship (the only controls were thrust, turn and hyperspace), and they had to be aware of what was happening on all sides of the screen. Their attempts to rid the screen of asteroids created more asteroids and increased the number of floating objects that could collide with the player’s ship, making the gamespace ever more dangerous as it continued.
