Asteroids!!!!
Ah yes I fondly remember playing this at my best friends house for hours and at the local skating rink on Friday and Saturday nights. Skate, play, pizza! So much fun, and it’s still fun today. The family loves playing Astroids on our Atari Fight Stick; seriously was the best purchase ever! As an 80’s kid I loved retro games and before I got into Raspberry Pi’s I used a Retron 3 cartridge system to play NES, SNES, and Sega. The Atari Fight Stick came with licensed Atari Games and with a swap for a Pi4B we purchased an image that had most if not all the famed Atari games from their classic consoles.
Here’s a little more history about Asteroids from the fantastic ClassicGaming.cc, which I highly encourage visits to and support.
he idea of Asteroids was originally conceived by Lyle Raines who was Atari’s vice president of engineering in 1979. Ed Logg, eventually took the lead on the project and is credited with it’s programming.
The game’s concept is simple: Shoot the large asteroids and break them into smaller asteroids. Then shoot those asteroids into even smaller asteroids. The smaller the size of the rocks, the faster they move. This asteroid field puts the player in an ever-increasing danger zone of flying debris. The UFO’s were added to spice things up and keep the player from just sitting there avoiding the asteroids.
Asteroids was designed on the same hardware as another of Atari’s classics: Lunar Lander. Both games used the high resolution, black and white vector-scan screens (in which the graphics are composed of lines drawn on a vector monitor). Yet Lunar Lander never became the world-wide phenomena that Asteroids did. Asteroids was so popular when it was released, it replaced Space Invaders as the king of the arcades and gave Atari enough cash to be financially independent from Warner.
“Senior engineer Steve Calfee reflected that Asteroids appeals to some low, primitive drive in the human mind to clean and take control of the environment. Blasting asteroids into rubble until a once-crowded screen turned into a neat black field appealed to people whose lives were nothing but a field of chaos. For them, Asteroids became a metaphor for life.” – Paul Schuytema, Microsoft Arcade, The Official Strategy Guide.
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