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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. A screenshot of the game Asteroids. ...
A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates computer or video games. ...
Atari Games was an American producer of arcade games, and originally part of Atari Inc. ...
Video game publishers are companies that publish video games that they have either developed internally or have had developed by a video game developer. ...
A game designer is a person who designs games. ...
Lyle Rains was a co-developer of the video game Asteroids, with Ed Logg. ...
Ed Logg was a co-developer of the video game Asteroids, with Lyle Rains. ...
This is a listing of computer and video game genres with brief descriptions and examples from each genre. ...
Radiant Silvergun Sega Saturn - ©1998 Treasure A shoot-em-up (shmup for short in some areas, and also known as arcade shooter, twitch shooter, space shooter, or sometimes simply just shooter, with shoot em ups being the most popular subgenre of shooter), is a computer and video game genre where...
This arcade cabinet, containing Centipede, is an upright. ...
Nineteen inch (48 cm) CRT computer monitor A computer display, monitor or screen is a computer peripheral device capable of showing characters and/or still or moving images generated by a computer and processed by a graphics card. ...
Steam Locomotive 7646 as a vector, originally Windows Metafile (converted to GIF for display here). ...
Mid-19th century tool for converting between different standards of the inch An inch is an Imperial and U.S. customary unit of length. ...
In computer science, porting is the adaptation of a piece of software so that it will function in a different computing environment to that for which it was originally written. ...
The Atari 2600, released in 1977, is the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. ...
The Atari 5200 is a video game console introduced in 1982 by Atari. ...
The Atari 7800 is a video game console released by Atari in 1986 (a test market occurred in June 1984). ...
The Atari Lynx is Ataris only handheld game console, and the first such machine with a color display. ...
The PlayStation is a video game console of the 32/64-bit era, first produced by Sony Computer Entertainment in the mid 1990s. ...
The Nintendo 64, commonly called the N64, is Nintendos third home video game console. ...
Microsoft Windows is a series of popular proprietary operating environments and operating systems created by Microsoft for use on personal computers and servers. ...
The Game Boy Color came in a myriad of different colors, as did earlier incarnations of the Game Boy. ...
Steam Locomotive 7646 as a vector, originally Windows Metafile (converted to GIF for display here). ...
Centipede by Atari is a typical example of a 1980s era arcade game. ...
Atari Games was an American producer of arcade games, and originally part of Atari Inc. ...
An asteroid is a small, solid object in our Solar System, orbiting the Sun. ...
In Space Invaders, the player controls the firing and horizontal position of the green cannon at the bottom, fending off constant attack by echelons of eponymous enemies. ...
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. Screenshot of Spacewar Spacewar was an early video game by Stephen Slug Russell, a multiplayer space-combat simulation inspired by Doc Smiths Lensman series of science fiction novels. ...
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. Lyle Rains was a co-developer of the video game Asteroids, with Ed Logg. ...
Ed Logg was a co-developer of the video game Asteroids, with Lyle Rains. ...
Lunar Lander was an early computer game that originally ran on the DEC GT40 graphics terminal (frequently connected to a PDP-10 mainframe computer) in 1974. ...
A video arcade (known as an amusement arcade in the United Kingdom) is a place where people play arcade video games. ...
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. Suppose the smiley face in the top left corner is an RGB bitmap image. ...
The Atari 2600, released in 1977, is the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. ...
Tempest is an arcade game by Atari. ...
Features The player's controls consisted 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 was not conserved, and it would start to slow down if thrust was not applied. There was also a hyperspace button, which randomly teleported the player's ship somewhere on the screen, with the risk of exploding upon rematerialization (or rematerializing inside an asteroid). In physics, hyperspace is a theoretical entity. ...
The player's ship spawned in the middle of the screen, with 4 large asteroids drifting around. Each large asteroid (20 points) would break into 2 medium-sized ones (50 points) when shot, which in turn would break into 2 small (100 points) asteroids. The medium and small asteroids, once "spawned", could travel at widely varying speeds. Periodically one of two types of flying saucers ("UFOs") would fly onto the screen: the big one (worth 200 points) would shoot in random directions, while the small one (1000 points) would attempt to aim at the player; they tended to appear more often when few asteroids remained on the screen and/or the player hadn't shot an asteroid recently. The screen wrapped 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 had 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 was 99,990 points, after which it turned back over to zero. A player who desired to get onto the top score list then had to 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.
Lurking
 The small UFO is the key to high scores for many advanced players. 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 manuever, 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. [1] 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. Image File history File links Asteroids_UFO.svg Summary The large UFO from Asteroids, rendered in SVG format using Notepad and some reference points from a MAME screenshot. ...
Image File history File links Asteroids_UFO.svg Summary The large UFO from Asteroids, rendered in SVG format using Notepad and some reference points from a MAME screenshot. ...
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. Vector game refers to any video game that uses a vector graphics display. ...
The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by MOS Technology in 1975. ...
Intel 80486DX2 microprocessor in a ceramic PGA package A central processing unit (CPU), or sometimes simply processor, is the component in a digital computer that interprets instructions and processes data contained in software. ...
There are many kinds of circuit An electric circuit interconnects electrical elements. ...
For the concept Atari (当ãŸã‚Š) in the board game of Go, see Atari (go term). ...
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. Sharma Ram (disambiguation) Ram Sharma is an amazing, talented teenager that lives in Canada His talents include rapping, comedy, and cooking He is bound to success! ...
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 There are many kinds of circuit An electric circuit interconnects electrical elements. ...
An electrical network is an interconnection of electrical elements such as resistors, inductors, capacitors, diodes, switches and transistors. ...
The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ...
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. A kilobyte (derived from the SI prefix kilo-, meaning 1000) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to either 1024 or 1000 bytes. ...
Read-only memory (ROM) is a class of storage media used in computers and other electronic devices. ...
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. Sinistar is an arcade game released by Williams in 1982. ...
Due to its success, Asteroids was followed by three sequels:
However, the original game was by far the most popular of the series. Asteroids Deluxe, the sequel to Asteroids, is an arcade game. ...
Blasteroids is one of the sequels to the original 1979 shoot em up video game Asteroids. ...
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. The Killer List of Videogames (or simply KLOV) is a web site devoted to cataloging arcade games past and present. ...
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. For the concept Atari (当ãŸã‚Š) in the board game of Go, see Atari (go term). ...
The Atari 2600, released in 1977, is the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. ...
The Atari 5200 is a video game console introduced in 1982 by Atari. ...
The Atari 7800 is a video game console released by Atari in 1986 (a test market occurred in June 1984). ...
The Atari Lynx is Ataris only handheld game console, and the first such machine with a color display. ...
The PlayStation is a video game console of the 32/64-bit era, first produced by Sony Computer Entertainment in the mid 1990s. ...
The Nintendo 64, commonly called the N64, is Nintendos third home video game console. ...
Microsoft Windows is a series of popular proprietary operating environments and operating systems created by Microsoft for use on personal computers and servers. ...
The Game Boy Color came in a myriad of different colors, as did earlier incarnations of the Game Boy. ...
The Atari Cosmos was a failed attempt by Atari to release a tabletop video game system that would utilize holography and LEDs to create a unique gaming experience. ...
TV Games are becoming popular as adults are able to play the nostalgic games, such as Asteroids, without the need for an Emulator. ...
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.. The Atari 2600, released in 1977, is the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. ...
Asteroids Deluxe, the sequel to Asteroids, is an arcade game. ...
Atari Anthology is a collection of 83 Atari games released in 2005 for the XBox and Playstation 2. ...
This article is becoming very long. ...
The PlayStation 2 (PS2) (Japanese: プレイステーション2) is Sonys second video game console, the successor to the PlayStation and the predecessor to the PlayStation 3. ...
Unofficial clones and variants
 Avenger class fighter unleashes nova bombs in Starscape. 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. Image File history File links NovaBombs. ...
Image File history File links NovaBombs. ...
Acornsoft was the software arm of Acorn Computers Ltd, and was a major publisher of games for the BBC Micro. ...
Stardust is a shoot-em-up computer game for the Amiga 500, released by the Finnish company Bloodhouse in 1993. ...
Starscape is a space combat game with 2D graphics. ...
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]
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. Nickname: City of Roses, Stumptown, Bridgetown Official website: http://www. ...
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. Buckner & Garcia are the duo of Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia. ...
Pac-Man Fever is a 1982 album recorded by Buckner and Garcia. ...
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