Asteroids, completed at the end of 1979, was a much celebrated arcade game that 
captured the imaginations of millions of players, while capturing a good many 
quarters as well.

The Creation of Asteroids

Asteroids was inspired by Lyle Rains, who suggested to Ed Logg that players 
might enjoy shooting big rocks into smaller pieces. "I guess the way I describe
it is that I'm the father of Asteroids," Rains said. "Ed Logg is the mother of 
Asteroids, because he had to live with it for nine months and deliver finished 
product. All I had to do was to provide a seed."

Remembrances from the Video Game Masters

Working on Asteroids was so intense that Lyle Rains and Ed Logg often dreamt about
their work. Lyle Rains: "In the course of my work I have always found that 
there are times during the development process when the project gets to me in 
such a way that I'm eating, drinking, sleeping, and breathing the project. When 
I close my eyes the images of the screen are there and I dream about them at night. 
There is something just very intense when you live with a project like that day and 
night, for months at a time. When we were working on Asteroids, I would play 
Asteroids for a number of hours in the evening, then I'd go home and I'd close 
my eyes, and as I was drifting off to sleep I'd see the asteroids floating around 
the screen. "

Ed Logg: "I was shooting the asteroids all night long . . . . I'd just play the 
game over and over and over in my head, just as if you were playing it in real 
life. To a certain extent, I play a lot of the games in my mind long before I 
ever write them because you have to get all the interactions down pat before you 
can start programming. I know what it's going to look like before I even get there."

Popular from the Start

A good barometer of a game's future success was how popular it was within the labs 
at Atari. The software developers often had to chase people away from their prototype 
machines when they arrived at their desks in the morning or returned from lunch. 
Lyle Rains: "The development on the really good games gets bogged down, because 
people want to . . . play them all the time. I was in the lab quite often playing 
Asteroids, as were many other people."On the overall popularity of Asteroids, Steve 
Calfee said:"A lot of people really liked it. Somehow there's something about 
people, they like to clean spaces. With Asteroids it's easy to measure your 
accomplishment, you're breaking big rocks into little rocks and then the little 
rocks into nothing. It's sort of a metaphor for life."Rich Adam recalled his own 
first encounter with Asteroids: "I'll never forget going into the lab and seeing 
that game for the first time.It was like an adrenaline rush. . . I'm out flying 
this spaceship and it's the miraculous escape. I've got this situation where I've 
got tons of these boulders flying around the screen, I have almost nowhere to go. 
I get to blast my way out of it and cheat death one more time. . . . That's a good 
fantasy. . . You've got all these things flying around and yet you're able to 
survive."

Howard Delman described what it was like creating the sounds for Asteroids: "In 
those days there were no all-purpose sound chips like we have now, so I had to 
create a hardware circuit for each sound. I would string together electrical 
circuits that would produce an output wave-form that corresponded to the wave-form 
of the sound. When put through an amplifier and a loud-speaker, it would sound 
like whatever I was trying to create. . .The boom-boom-boom background sound was 
sort of meant to be like a heartbeat, and the idea was that as the game progressed, 
the sound sped up, and the player's heart would speed up, too. You know, stress!"

The Great 25-Cent Escape

On the intensity of playing Asteroids, Ed Rotberg recalled: "Asteroids was just 
so intense in the fact that you had a concept of all around fantasy. You had to 
keep your eyes constantly in motion around the screen because the danger could be 
coming from any direction, at anytime, and it was always so imminent. In Asteroids 
it was just you out there, trying to survive. It's an incredibly intense game. The 
tuning in terms of how fast the spaceship turns and how fast the bullets move and 
how far they go and how fast the asteroids can go, just all the tuning that Ed Logg 
put into that, is real artistry. Asteroids is a video game artistic masterpiece."

The simple fact that the spaceship in Asteroids continues to move after you cut 
thrust, providing a wee glimpse of the Newtonian mechanics of actual space flight, 
triggered the imaginations of many users. Rich Adam said: "Asteroids fulfilled the 
fantasy of being out in space, with no gravity, and free floating. The spaceship 
had a very elegant grace. A lot of motion in the game had grace, even the way the 
boulders floated around."And the epic quality of the game was noted by Ed Rotberg: 
"What Asteroids allows players to do is to put themselves in an incredible 
predicament, and then extricate themselves from it. You feel like a hero coming 
out of it."