History

Asteroids was designed by Lyle Rains, Ed Logg, and Dominic Walsh and released in 1979 by Atari. It was one of the first major hits of the “golden age of arcade games”, selling over 70 thousand arcade cabinets and was insanely popular with both players and developers. It was later ported to Atari’s home consoles, selling over 3 million copies. The game was very often imitated, and it directly influenced Defender, Gravitar, and many other games.

Rules

• The player controls are triangular ship. It can do 3 things: rotate left or right, thrust forward, and shoot projectiles forward.
• Once the ship begins moving in a direction, it will continue in that direction for a time without any input unless the player applies thrust in a different direction.
• The screen wraps around itself: if you move to the right edge of the screen, you will end up on the left, and vice versa. Same with the top and bottom.
• There are asteroids flying around, and after reaching a certain number of points saucers appear. When asteroids are destroyed, they are divided into two smaller asteroids, to a maximum of two times. Saucers fly more purposefully, shoot projectiles, and can be destroyed if they hit an asteroid. When the player destroys anything by shooting it, he gains points.
• If the player collides with any obstacle or projectile, their ship gets destroyed. The player has 3 lives, and the game ends when they lose all of them.

Goal

The goal of asteroids is to destroy obstacles as much as possible to gain the biggest amount of points before losing all your lives and getting a game over.

Play It!