1979 · Atari
Asteroids
A lone triangle against a drifting rockfield, drawn in glowing vector lines — Atari's 1979 physics masterpiece where your own momentum is the deadliest enemy.
- Year
- 1979
- Genre
- Shooter
- Original
- Arcade
Conceived by Lyle Rains and programmed by Ed Logg, Asteroids arrived in 1979 drawn not with pixels but with light: a vector monitor traced its ships and rocks as glowing lines on black, sharper than anything raster hardware could manage. It became Atari's best-selling coin-op arcade game, and cabinets had to be fitted with larger coin boxes to hold the takings.
The game gives you a triangle, a rockfield and Newtonian physics. Your ship keeps drifting the way you last thrust, so every burst of speed is a debt you must pay when you need to stop. Shooting a large asteroid splits it into medium ones, then small fast ones — meaning every shot you fire makes the screen more dangerous, not less.
Add the flying saucers — especially the small one that aims with lethal accuracy — and the last-resort hyperspace button that teleports you somewhere possibly worse, and you have one of the purest risk-reward loops ever designed. Asteroids rewards restraint and cold nerves; panic, and your own momentum finishes you off.
The browser version linked below is a third-party remake at freeasteroids.org, made for web browsers on desktop computers — vector cool, drifting menace, one click away. It needs a keyboard, so it cannot be played on phones or tablets.