Never played this classic? Give it a shot over here!
So, what is there to say about it? On the surface and at first glance, there isn't really too much to say, right? 'Alex!', I hear you cry. 'It's just a load of white lines and 'boopboopboopboop' music, some pew pew pew and stuff blowing up!' You're not entirely wrong, but damn it, there's more to it than meets the eye!
Unleashed upon arcades in 1979, Asteroids was one of Atari's most popular home-developed projects in the Golden Age of Arcade Gaming. Fondly remembered for its simplistic control scheme and stark graphical style, it has a key feature of what makes games fun to play-- it's easy to play and somewhat fiendish to master. It's also notable that it uses (wait for it) a whopping 6kb of ROM code. Now that's space management (pun initially not intended).
The theme of the game is space, which is hardly surprising for the time. It started development around the time that Star Wars came out, when American nerd culture was shaken by the space opera that took their imaginations by storm. The idea is simple-- you control a ship and shoot apart the asteroids that would smash you up if you collided with them. Now and then, UFOs will come along and you have to shoot those, too. Without getting stuffy and pretentious, it is a simple non-story of survival and lasting as long as you can in an environment where everything is trying to kill you. You can expand upon it if you so wish, and be playing a dashing space captain trying desperately to return to Earth with what little of his crew is left after a disastrous mission, constantly under threat of hostile alien forces. Or perhaps it's all in the Captain's head and he's in a coma, on the very ship you're controlling? It's an arcade game, let's not think too hard on this one.
The graphics are minimalistic, using only black for the background and white wire for the objects. Geometric shapes are the basis for all of the objects in the game-- it takes some willing suspension of disbelief, but those are, in fact, asteroids and chunks of them that you're avoiding. The triangle you control is your ship (the direction in which the tip points is the direction within which you shoot), the triangle beneath it is the booster (a cute touch) and you shoot cool little white lines as bullets. The monochromatic colour scheme keeps things simple and easy to follow, even when lots is going on at once. It's minimal, it's slick, it works. Something interesting to note is definitely the wraparound screen, which gives a sense of space and how much you have to work with, especially when things start getting hectic. It also expresses a sense of infinity, fitting for its subject matter.
Using simple physics, the player's ship accelerates and decelerates in the black expanses of space. Simply put, when you stop the input to move, you don't just stop dead in your tracks- you drift, giving the controls a floaty feel and a basic level of skill comes in. If you work with the drift, you have a lot more manoeuvrability, but it can also lead a careless player to their certain doom.
It may seem odd to think of it nowadays with our AAA games, fancy graphics and things like stories, but this basic game was such a huge hit and demand was so high that Atari ended up shipping it in cabinets for Lunar Landing, something of a spiritual sequel. Even now, it holds up as something playable and enjoyable.
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