On the Rocks

Reeling from the fact that they hadn’t been responsible for quarter gobbler Space Invaders, Atari desperately scrambles for the next insanely great arcade game. In 1978, 27-year-old Atari engineering Vice President Lyle Rains, having joined Atari back in 1973, is developing a game concept for Cosmos. the company’s planned holographic gaming project headed by Pong engineer Al Alcorn. With the working title of Planet Grab and rendered in 3D graphics, the game would involve players piloting around a solar system, claiming planets by touching them. Dubbed Holoptics, this 3D gaming system is little more than a pipe dream by Atari and is later prototyped as a programmable, tabletop game system shown to the public at the 1981 Winter CES in Las Vegas, as well as the annual Toy Fair in NYC. The much-hyped holographic content is limited to flat 3D backgrounds placed underneath a simple LED display, although the two white-light-reflection holograms included with each game cartridge can be displayed alternately by the unit changing the light source. The initial lineup of eight games for the system is to include Superman, Football, Roadrunner, Outlaw, Sea Battle, Space Invaders and, in a nice bit of symmetry, has Asteroids as a pack-in card. Like the original Odyssey home video game by Magnavox, the cartridges for Cosmos: The Third Dimension contain no ROM chips; they merely have jumpers that adjust the hardware inside the console. Cosmos itself does, however, contain two microprocessors: one to control the LED patterns, and another to output complex sound effects.

Kids play the unreleased Atari Cosmos electronic game, 1981 promo image

The mixed critical reception of the Cosmos prototype and its planned $100 price tag gets it shelved that same year. With the closure of the project, holographic games may not make it to the store shelves, but the technology behind them eventually hits pay dirt. The Holoptics process developed for the Cosmos gaming system is picked up by the scientists responsible for developing it, who then take it to another company where it is used to cheaply create embossed holograms on credit cards as a security feature, eventually becoming the standard in that industry.

Cosmos: The not-exactly-groundbreaking Atari handheld game

Lyle Rains, 1980

Cosmos ad: A whole new dimension in “meh”

Cosmos ad: “life like” leaves a lot open to interpretation

Lyle Rains and Dona Bailey work on the attract mode for Centipede, 1981

Designer Ed Logg and his creation, circa 1999. The “Gold Anniversary” version of Asteroids, made to celebrate the game’s one-year anniversary AND its ranking as the top-selling arcade game of 1980, sat in the lobby of Atari for years.

Breaking Rocks and Records

Rains discusses his ideas with Atari designer Ed Logg, and the scenario of having players blow up astronomical objects instead of merely touching them is developed. Thus is Planet Grab retooled and the scope scaled down (or up) into a new arcade game. It will utilize an advanced display system, which has only appeared in one other game, the first Atari vector graphics game, in fact: Lunar Lander. Released in Fall of 1979, Lander uses a new process to plot the straight lines that make up the symbols on the screen, called QuadraScan. It produces image resolution much higher than other vector systems or standard raster graphics. By having the beam that draws the vectors controlled by the circuit board rather than the monitor, this technology also allows the new game to feature precisely-drawn objects on the screen that appear from any direction, at variable speeds, but with a constant brightness to the lines that create them. Logg takes the movement scheme and visual design of the player’s spaceship directly from his memories of playing Steve Russell’s Spacewar!, while at Stanford University. He had also played the first coin-op videogame Galaxy Game, itself based on Spacewar!, at Stanford’s Tressider Union Coffeehouse.

Atari trade ad featuring Lyle Rains, Don Osborne and Mary Takatsuno… and Asteroids

While working on the game, the Atari developers refer to it as Champagne Wars, due to the floating rocks in space reminding them of the bubbles that float freely at the end of TV’s The Lawrence Welk Show. Logg and his team know they have “wunnerful, wunnerful” hit on their hands; they literally have to pull Atari employees off the prototype in order to work on it. One particular player they have to constantly shoo away is Owen Rubin, co-creator of the 1983 vector graphics epic Major Havoc, among many other games at Atari. Logg and other players get so sick of Rubin’s initials filling the high score table of the prototype, Logg programs a routine in the game so that whenever Rubin would enter any combination of his initials in, they are converted into Logg’s initials.

When the game is released in late 1979 under the title Asteroids, all its rabid devotees inside Atari are proven correct. Asteroids is a truly watershed arcade videogame…it literally helps define the genre in the minds of the public. A perfect synergy between simplicity and intense gameplay, the game has players using buttons to thrust a spaceship around an asteroid field. When one rock is shot, it breaks into smaller ones, often flying off in different directions at different speeds. Using the Hyperspace button, the player’s ship can jump to a random point on the screen to escape immediate death, but at the risk of re-appearing in the path of an oncoming projectile. Every so often flying saucers enter the screen, intent on the player’s destruction.

Never tell me the odds! Gameplay in Asteroids, 1979

Along with the reward of a new ship every 10,000 points,  adding to the popularity of the game is the high-score system introduced by Asteroids, allowing players other than Owen Rubin to record their initials to be displayed next to their score for all to see. Until, that is, the game is turned off for the night by the operator, and the high-scores wiped.

Asteroids is created under a label referred to by the company as Atari Space, a complement to their more down-to-earth Atari Sports brand. Demand for the game is so strong that Atari halts production of Lunar Lander (released just two months earlier), to switch over to making more Asteroids cabinets. They go on to sell in excess of 70,000 units, outselling every other Atari game yet made and smashing the previous coin-op sales record set by Midway’s Space Invaders. It stubbornly sits at or near the top of sales charts for years, pulling in 10 million quarters a day in 1980 alone. At that year’s AMOA show in Chicago, coin-op trade magazine Play Meter presents Asteroids with an award for video game excellence, citing it as the highest earning video game of 1980. By summer of that year, Asteroid cabinets in well-travelled locations can pull in upwards of $700 worth of quarters each. I myself become a hopeless addict; perfecting the “save one slow-moving meteorite and poach the UFO when it comes out to farm free ships” strategy in my arcade. I’m not the only one with this strategy, of course. In 1980 Atari comes out with a mod kit to curtail this kind of long playing chicanery, by having the flying saucer that comes out start firing directly at the player immediately. Before, the ship would have to travel one-sixth of the way across the screen before opening fire. The modification also lets the missiles of the ship wrap-around the screen boundaries, making its shots much more difficult to evade.

To me, Asteroids was the first arcade game to really suck me into its premise and execution. I was never that much of a Space Invaders fan, it was just too relentlessly monotonous. Asteroids, with its cool ship inertia and frighteningly close shaves between the rocks, is simply a masterpiece of design and programming. While the games that inspired Asteroids, such as Spacewar! and Computer Space had pioneered the concept of inertia in video games, the feeling of actual physics being played out in Logg’s creation is a huge draw of the game. The popularization of the idea of the player being unshackled from the bottom of the screen and allowed to move in any direction is another highly seminal aspect of Asteroids that would influence countless designers, including Eugene Jarvis when he is developing Defender. Also influenced are musical duo Buckner & Garcia, who include the Asteroids-themed song Hyperspace on their popular video game based album Pac-Man Fever in 1982. For his part in Asteroids’ development, in 1980 Lyle Rains is promoted to Director of Engineering, Coin-Operated Games Division at Atari.

Chips Off the Old Block

Blasteroids creator Ed Rotberg, 1982

‘Battlezone’ and ‘Blasteroids’ creator Ed Rotberg, from the 1996 ‘Arcade’s Greatest Hits’ game compilation by Midway

‘Blasteroids’, a raster makeover released in 1987

Asteroids is followed by Dave Shepperd’s sequel Asteroids Deluxe, released in March of 1981, featuring objects that zero-in on the players’ ship as well as offering a limited-use shield for gamers to protect themselves. The next year sees colour brought to the Asteroid field in Space Duel, along with two-player simultaneous play. Designed by Shepperd, Rick Maurer (VCS version of Space Invaders), Owen Rubin (Major Havoc), and Steve Calfee, the space rocks of Asteroids are here replaced by geometric shapes. Raster graphics makeover Blasteroids comes in 1987, headed by long-time Atari alum Ed Rotberg of Battlezone fame. Rotberg had left Atari in 1981 to help found indie development company Videa Inc. with Roger Hector, and accepts the offer from Atari Games to come work on a re-tool of the Asteroids concept. In this new version, a choice of three ships is available, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. For the graphics, Rotberg taps Industrial Light and Magic model maker Bill George to build plastic models of each ship, that are then digitized in the required rotations with proper lighting with assistance from Rob Rowe. As for the asteroids themselves, these are simply lava rocks painted white and then digitized. Another notable variation on the theme is a Sega/Gremlin 1981 vector graphics knock-off, the talking Space Fury.

Ann (left) and Nancy Wilson of Heart go crazy on a ‘Space Duel’ cabinet, 1982

Actor and comedian Dan Aykroyd in front of a Space Duel Atari video game

Revamp ‘Asteroids Deluxe’, 1981

A Smash on Television

It’s inevitable that Asteroids would cruise over to the Atari VCS as an arcade port, and so it does in July of 1981, designed by Brad Stewart. The game makes a rocky (ouch!) transition to the console, with Stewart struggling to translate the 8K’s worth of information in the arcade version to the 4K VCS carts. An initial version is met with such disdain internally at Atari that the game’s release is delayed while Stewart goes back to the drawing board and utilizes a new “bank switching” technique. This process involves switching back and forth quickly between different addresses of the 4K memory bank, effectively giving the game 8K to work with. This version of Asteroids features available simultaneous two-player mode and 66 game options. Using these different modes, players can swap out the hyperspace ability with a shield or an instant 180-degree flip option.

Breaking pixels: Asteroids for the Atari 2600

Asteroids on the VCS becomes yet another hit for Atari’s home console, so popular that stores like F.A.O. Schwarz in NYC strictly rations the amount of Asteroids cartridges put up on shelves over the 1981 holiday season to make sure there are at least a few copies left into December. The home version of Asteroids solidifies its place at the top of home video game sales charts, chiseled in at #1 for months until unseated by the release of Atari’s home version of arcade wunderkind Pac-Man.

VCS Asteroids creator Stewart eventually leaves Atari for the greener pastures of third-party game maker Imagic, making Fire Fighter for the company. On contract to Parker Brothers, he goes on to create the Atari 8-bit computer port of Star Wars: The Arcade Game.

JUMP: Asteroids video playlist

You have Asteroids! And your Atari 2600, too. 1981

Still breaking rocks: Asteroids Deluxe on the Atari ST, 1987

A rocky road for the Atari 7800: Asteroids, 1987

Super Asteroids and Missile Command for the Atari Lynx, 1995

You’ve got Asteroids in your pocket! Game Boy version 1992

Asteroids Hyper 64 for the Nintendo 64, 1999

Breaking away: The Asteroids remake for the Sony Playstation, 1998

Asteroids is broken up for various home adaptations, including versions for the Atari 7800, Atari ST computer, Nintendo Game Boy, Atari Lynx, Nintendo 64 and the Sony PlayStation, among others. Over an illustrious 16 year career at Atari, arcade Asteroids creator Ed Logg develops some of their more memorable arcade games, including Centipede (with Dona Bailey), Millipede, Gauntlet (with Bob Flanagan), Gauntlet II, XYbots, and Steel Talons.  

Players compete in Atlanta as part of the Atari International Asteroids Tournament, 1981

Flyer for Ed Logg’s Steel Talons arcade combat flight sim, 1991