Classic Video Games Codexery

Asteroids (video game)

Shoot the rocks, dodge the saucers, and survive the asteroid field.

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Asteroids is an arcade game where the player controls a triangular ship that destroys asteroids and flying saucers.[1] The game was one of the first major hits of the golden age of arcade games, selling 47,840 upright cabinets and 8,725 cocktail cabinets.[2] It proved both popular with players and influential with developers.[2]

Making and release

The hardware is a vector game using a MOS 6502 processor and a Digital Vector Generator.[3] Logg modeled the ship, controls, and physics after Spacewar!, which he had played at the University of California, Berkeley.[4] The game was released on November 17, 1979 in the USA at an MSRP of $1745.[5] The first 200 Asteroids machines were actually Lunar Lander cabinets because demand was so high.[5]

The game sold 47,840 upright cabinets and 8,725 cocktail cabinets in total.[5] It was ported to the Atari VCS in 1981, becoming the first game for that console to use bank switching to fit into an 8 KB cartridge.[6] Lyle Rains and Ed Logg together created the concept for Asteroids, and the hardware they utilized had been built by Wendi Allen (then Howard Delman) for an earlier game, Lunar Lander.[7] The Atari 2600 port of Asteroids achieved sales exceeding three million copies.[2]

What the cited sources add

The Arcade-History account states that Asteroids introduced real-world physics to video games for the first time, with speed and inertia adding to the player's problems.[5] The same source notes that Asteroids and Lunar Lander were the first two video games ever registered in the Copyright Office on June 17, 1980.[5] The Arcade-History account reports that Atari produced exactly 56,565 units of Asteroids in total.[5] The Digital Press interview with Brad Stewart confirms that Asteroids was the first bank-switched VCS game ever released.[8]

The AtariProtos account notes that the Atari 5200 version of Asteroids was the only launch title for that system never to be released.[9]

References

  1. Wikipedia, "Asteroids (video game)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Chris Kohler, "Asteroids Designer Ed Logg Honored With Pioneer Award", Condé Nast Publications, November 17, 2011 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  2. Wikipedia, "Asteroids (video game)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Monfort, "Racing the Beam", MIT Press, 2009; "The Making of Defender", Imagine Publishing, October 2008, p. 34–39 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  3. Wikipedia, "Asteroids (video game)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Brett Alan Weiss, "Asteroids", allgame; "The Making of Asteroids", Imagine Publishing, 2009; Edge Staff, "The Making of Asteroids", Future plc; Monfort, "Racing the Beam", MIT Press, 2009; Chris Kohler, "Asteroids Designer Ed Logg Honored With Pioneer Award", Condé Nast Publications, November 17, 2011; Dillion, "The Golden Age of Video Games: The Birth of a Multibillion Dollar Industry", CRC Press, 2011, p. 58; Asteroids Flyer, 1979, Atari, Inc. (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  4. Wikipedia, "Asteroids (video game)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Chris Kohler, "Asteroids Designer Ed Logg Honored With Pioneer Award", Condé Nast Publications, November 17, 2011; "The Making of Asteroids", Imagine Publishing, 2009; Salen, "Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals", MIT Press, 2004; "The Making of Asteroids", Imagine Publishing, 2009; Edge Staff, "The Making of Asteroids", Future plc; "The Making of Asteroids", Imagine Publishing, 2009 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  5. Arcade-History/Gaming-history, "Asteroids [Upright model], the Arcade Video game", 2025. facts only, no text reused. arcade-history.com
  6. Wikipedia, "Asteroids (video game)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Scott Stilphen, "DP Interviews... Brad Stewart", Digital Press, 2001; Reichert, "Asteroids", AtariProtos.com (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  7. Wikipedia, "Asteroids (video game)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Production Numbers", Atari, 1999 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  8. Scott Stilphen, "DP Interviews... Brad Stewart", Digital Press, 2001. facts only, no text reused. digitpress.com
  9. Reichert, "Asteroids", AtariProtos.com. facts only, no text reused. atariprotos.com

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Asteroids (video game) (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.

Related entries

Named in this entry

Lunar Lander (video game genre)Computer SpaceSpace Invaders

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Sources

Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.

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