#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.