Extropia’s Retro-gaming: Asteroids

in #retro6 years ago

EXTROPIA’S RETRO-GAMING

‘ASTEROIDS’.

Question: What does a donut have to do with ‘Asteroids’?

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(An Asteroids arcade with programmer Ed Logg. Image from wikimedia commons).

I’ll provide the answer later, but for now let’s talk about the game itself. Unlike the other games I have covered, Asteroids is a definite classic. Released in 1979, the game has since been converted to just about every format and continues to be bundled with retro compilations. This means that, unlike other titles I have covered, you should have no problem tracking down an emulation of Asteroids and giving it a go. It’s well worth it too, because this really has stood the test of time.

The origins of this classic can be found in a vector graphics generator that an Atari engineer named Howie Delman had created. Its first outing was in a game called Lunar Lander, which challenged players to dock a landing craft on the moon using limited rocket fuel.

Few people remember Lunar Lander today, but Lyle Rains (who was Vice-president of Atari’s coin-op division) had an idea that the ship could shoot at asteroids instead. He explained his idea to a programmer called Ed Logg, along with other ideas such as making the asteroids grow smaller with each successful hit.

The game took six weeks to complete. The arcade game it was housed in featured five buttons that gave the player the ability to rotate left, rotate right, fire the thrusters, fire the lasers, and perform a hyperspace jump. The game always began with the player’s ship in the middle of the screen with the titular rocks floating toward the ship. Should an asteroid collide with your ship, you lose a life and will respawn at a random spot on the screen.

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(Image from Atari)

At first you only need to rotate and shoot, but as the screen starts filling up with smaller, faster moving debris, and particularly once weaponised UFOs start putting in an appearance, it’s time to fire up the thrusters and learn how to manoeuvre the ship. The game features some fairly realistic physics, requiring the player to apply Newtonian laws like ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’ when controlling the ship in motion. Once set off, the ship will continue on that path unless you change its course by applying thrusters in another direction. If all else fails and neither lasering or avoiding the asteroids can save you, there is always the hyperspace option that will instantaneously teleport you to another point on the screen. However, there’s no guarantee your new position will be any safer.

Asteroids is one of those games that’s easy to pick up but difficult to master. Most people last less than a minute at first, while true masters can last for hours-36 hours in the case of the world’s endurance record for this game. If you’re wondering how anyone can last that long (don’t they need to eat or pee??) the answer is that at every 1000 points you gain and extra life, and this expert racked up so many extra lives he could take a lunch or loo break without it being ‘game over’.

Asteroids remains a great game to this day. It has spawned a couple of sequels (Asteroids Deluxe and Blasteroids) but the original is the best.

Now to that question I post at the beginning. You will recall how I said your ship will travel endlessly in one direction unless you change direction. How is that possible on a finite screen? Well, your ship simply disappears off one edge of the screen only to reappear at the other edge. Imagine the screen is a sheet of paper, then visualise connecting the top edge to the bottom edge by curling the sheet into a tube. You can also travel all the way to the left of the screen only to reappear on the right. Visualise the tube bent into a circle so the opposite ends meet.

This torus you should now be visualising represents the play area of asteroids, a finite space without boundaries. A torus happens to be the shape of a ringed donut, so that’s what a donut has to do with Asteroids!

Thanks to Atari for the images.

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One of my favorite games of all time. Its brilliance is in its ability to remain simple but with a lot of nuance and strategy. For a game that's nearly 40 years old, it remains fun to play yet today.

Its the #1 stand up cabinet that I want to add to my game room.

These graphics pale in comparison to the state-of-the-art Asteroids Deluxe =D. Ever play Space Duel?

I think so? Is that the Nolan Bushnell game, the one he made before Pong? If so, I had a go at a videogames exhibition years ago.

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