#8: Asteroids (1979, Atari)

In case you hadn't noticed by now, Atari kind of had a chokehold on the games industry toward the end of the '70s and in the early '80s. It's kind of comparable to what we'll see with Nintendo when we get to the late '80s - they basically ran the show. It wasn't just business clout that did it, though. Great games like Asteroids helped keep Atari on top.

Asteroids follows the standard early games "easy to learn, hard to master" formula. You're a triangle. There's rocks. You need to clear the screen of rocks armed only with a peashooter. If you blast a rock it splits into several smaller rocks, which split again if you blast them and so on until they're gone. It's a metaphor for life, really. See, if you're the triangle, then the rocks are problems! And if you try to solve the problems with violence, they just become more problems! Until, uh, you use violence to make them into tiny problems which you can easily crush and...okay, the metaphor kind of falls apart after awhile.

As usual with early games there have been plenty of remakes of and sequels to Asteroids over the years. One of the most beloved is Blasteroids, also by Atari, which featured power-ups and a morphing ship. Asteroids also led to other classic games like Sinistar.

The version of Asteroids I played was the revision 4 chipset and was emulated in MAME.

One coin. One play. No mercy.

Asteroids is pretty easy to get a handle on. You've got your ship, you've got your rocks and you've got your peashooter. Shoot the rocks and clear them out before any of them crush you. You can also use your ship's thrusters to move around, though this is pretty dangerous until you get the hang of it. Finally, there's a hyperdrive button that randomly warps you around the screen, typically right into the path of an oncoming asteroid. That's your panic button, in other words.

As you blast the asteroids they fall apart into smaller pieces. These bits also tend to move faster and are therefore more dangerous. Best to clear them out first wherever possible.

The UFO near the top of the screen pops up every once in a while to make things interesting. It spews bullets all over the place at random. Interestingly enough, it plays by the same rules that you do - its bullets affect asteroids just like yours and it's just as vulnerable to asteroids as you are. It's pretty common for the UFO to be smashed to bits by a stray asteroid shortly after appearing.

We're still not quite at the era of health bars yet, so touching an asteroid or being shot by the UFO even once means death. You've only got a few lives so it's best to avoid this, naturally.

That's all there is to Asteroids! When you clear out all the rocks the game just throws more at you. You keep going until you die. Once again, it's just like life. I think the list is starting to teach me things about myself.