Asteroids is one of the earliest big video game hits – one that was a major success for both Atari and arcades. It was released in 1979 and became Atari’s top selling game.
Its incredibly simple gameplay was a big hit, and its vector graphics made it look great. Asteroids was an incredibly influential game and remained in the public’s minds for many years.
Lyle Raines
Asteroids is one of the most popular arcade video games of all time, and it has been credited with influencing a number of space-themed games that followed it. It was also the first vector-based game, which made use of a two-dimensional display instead of the traditional raster graphics.
Atari’s senior software engineer Lyle Raines was responsible for developing the game. He had previously worked on Lunar Lander, a vector-display arcade game that was a hit with Atari’s customers. He was tasked with designing a game that would appeal to new players.
As he was designing the game, Raines had a rough idea of how it would work. He had a vision of a spacecraft that would be able to fly through the asteroid field and avoid being shot down. He also wanted to include a score system that would reward players for shooting down asteroids as they passed them, similar to the scoring systems in Spacewar! and Computer Space.
When he showed this to Ed Logg, who was working on the game’s programming, Logg quickly realized that the design and control scheme were a perfect fit for Atari’s hardware. The game was designed to run on a MOS 6502 and QuadraScan, the company’s high-resolution vector graphics processor.
In addition to the game’s design, Logg added code that triggered the dumb saucer to break up the big asteroids into smaller ones; this aimed at breaking the player’s momentum as they moved around the screen. Another feature, known as “Sluggo” (or simply “Sluggo”), caused the dumb saucer to shoot randomly at asteroids that snuck by.
Once the game was complete, it was tested by both young and old players and in focus groups at Atari. It was a huge success, and it was soon a standard fixture in bars and taverns across the country.
To encourage more people to play the game, Logg created a special version for Atari’s staff. These employees, according to an article in Esquire, would “wander between labs, passing comment and stopping to play as they went”.
While Asteroids was a hit with both staff and customers, it was difficult for the company to keep up with demand. This led to an outcry from tavern owners, who had always avoided coin-op games because of their underworld reputation.
Ed Logg
The game asteroids was created by Ed Logg, who was a programmer and designer at Atari in the 1980s. He was responsible for a series of wildly successful coin-op games, including Super Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede, and Gauntlet.
Asteroids is a two-dimensional vector shooter game where players control a spaceship. The goal is to shoot asteroids that appear in the field and destroy them. As you shoot, the asteroids split into smaller rocks that spawn new asteroids to shoot. The size of the asteroids changes, so it’s important to shoot smaller asteroids to earn more points.
While many games have a similar concept, Asteroids was unique in its use of vector graphics and its intuitive controls. It also featured cooperative multiplayer.
Logg was a graduate of Stanford University’s AI Lab, where he devoted his free time to creating video games. He joined Atari in 1978, where he helped design Dirt Bike and Wolf Pack.
He co-developed Super Breakout with Ed Rotberg, and was instrumental in the development of Asteroids. After the success of Asteroids, he branched out into home games, porting coin-op classics such as Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey to consoles.
During the golden age of arcade gaming, Asteroids was one of the most popular titles in arcades. In fact, it was the best-selling video game of all time in terms of production numbers. In addition to being a popular arcade title, Asteroids was remade for the Atari 2600 and Game Boy Color.
Asteroids is a simple, yet highly addictive video game that can still hold up to modern gamers today. It’s a great example of the power of the computer to make immersive, colorful graphics that are easy to control. Its intuitive controls make the game a joy to play, while its challenging levels keep it fun for hours at a time. It’s also an excellent learning experience for people who haven’t played a lot of video games.
Howard Delman
Asteroids was a revolutionary video game that revolutionized the industry and became one of the world’s best-selling arcade games of all time. It was developed by Lyle Raines, Ed Logg and Howard Delman for Atari in 1979.
Atari was a young company in its infancy, and the development of the games they produced was an intense process. They had little money, no office space and only a few people to work on the software and hardware. This made it difficult to keep the project moving forward, but the game was eventually finished.
After a meeting between Logg and Rains, Delman was selected to design the hardware for the game. He had previously designed hardware for Lunar Lander, a game that was also released by Atari and which was highly successful. He also had experience with vector graphics.
In the game, the player controls a small spaceship that shoots missiles at asteroid fields. The asteroids split into smaller ones after the shots are fired, and each asteroid is worth a certain amount of points depending on its size. Flying saucers occasionally enter the field, and when they do, the player has to shoot them as well in order to destroy them and score points.
Unlike many games of the era, Asteroids used a wraparound screen that moved objects both on and off of the screen as they passed through it. This was a new concept for the company and it would be the basis of a number of games in the years to come, including Sinistar (1980) and Pac-Man (1980).
The game was implemented on an XY monitor with a MOS 6502 running the game program. The display uses quadra-scan, a high-resolution vector graphics processor developed by Atari and referred to as the “XY display system.”
Asteroids was an immediate success and is still regarded as a classic video game today. It has been ported to numerous systems and is still widely available in various versions for home computers and video game consoles. It was rereleased for the PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Game Boy Color and Windows in 1998, with massively updated gameplay, graphics and sound.
Atari Arcades
Asteroids is a classic arcade game that became popular in 1979 and has been ported to many other video games. It was developed by Lyle Raines, Ed Logg and Dominic Walsh and released in November 1979.
The main gameplay of Asteroids involves shooting asteroids and flying saucers while not colliding with them or getting hit by the saucer’s counter-fire. As the number of asteroids increases, the gameplay becomes more difficult.
In the game, the player controls a spaceship that moves around a black screen, firing at the asteroids and saucers that appear on the screen. The spaceship is surrounded by a two-note soundtrack that slowly increases in speed, increasing the suspense of the game. The player must use this soundtrack to guide the spaceship to a point where it can destroy all of the asteroids on the screen before the soundtrack stops.
At first glance, the graphics in Asteroids look pretty basic – a few white lines on a black background. That’s because they’re made out of vector graphics, rather than raster graphics.
This is because vector graphics are much faster and more accurate to render than raster graphics, which can be difficult to control and require lots of processing power. The game’s developers wanted to use a vector display for Asteroids because they thought it would provide a better game experience.
Another reason that Asteroids uses a vector display is because the game’s designers felt that it’s easier to manipulate the game’s environment by changing its scale than by using raster graphics. Using a vector display for Asteroids also meant that the game would be more stable and less susceptible to sudden changes in its environment.
While attempting to implement a vector display, Logg and his team had to overcome many technical obstacles. One was that the hardware needed to support a vector display was expensive. In order to solve this problem, Logg had to make the graphics smaller and more compact. This resulted in a game with a lower resolution than some other arcade titles at the time.
The game’s creators eventually found a solution to this problem by using the DVG (Digital Vector Generator), a chip that can create high-resolution images for low-cost hardware. This allowed Asteroids to have more complex graphics than other games at the time. In addition, the DVG could be easily modified for different games by swapping the cartridge and ROMs. This also made the game cheaper to manufacture. The DVG also allowed for the creation of a bank-switched cartridge, which doubled the amount of ROM space available for the game. This was the first time that a bank-switched cartridge was used in an arcade game.
