Atari Asteroids: Creating a Vector Arcade Classic
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The 7-Eleven where I grew up was just a convenient place to get a Slurpee or a Big Gulp before they got their first Asteroids machine. Word got out in the small town where I grew up and we would all take any opportunity to go down and try to beat the latest high score. Having your initials on the leader board would create jealousy among my male peers and desire among the females. Who wouldn't want to be seen with the high-score holder? We spent hours trying to outdo each other. Competition was fierce and taunting was normal behavior.
The store had several other machines over the years including Frogger, Space Invaders, Supreme Commander (is that a real one - the nuclear bomber game), Centipede, etc. and periodically the owner would rotate new machines in and old ones out. The one game that he had two of was Asteroids. It was extremely popular. Other places in town also got in on the arcade games bandwagon and before long you could play at the pool hall (spent a lot of time there too), almost every beer joint, and even some fast food joints. Anywhere you might see a crowd of people waiting for something became a great place to give them a way to spend their time and their quarters before you soaked them on the main event.
While working with one crew in town we passed our time gambling by pitching quarters. The quarter closest to the line would win all. We even used the lane stripes on the highway in some spots if the traffic was low or non-existent. There was no better feeling than getting off work with a shit-ton of someone else's quarters to drop in the slot.
I love that game. I bought an emulator version for my kids when they were old enough to understand video game controls and they love it too.
I worked with a guy in Houston several years ago and we were shooting the breeze when he mentioned that he had just bought several pinball machines to restore. I asked him what his favorite arcade game had been while he was growing up. He told me he only played pinball. I was hoping he could be my new best friend and we could hang out and waste time with his Asteroids game but nope, just another Pinball wizard loser. ;)
MAME makes the newest revision the 'default' (in terms of their ROM naming) so I sometimes feel like that's the one I 'ought' to play but it's very much harder than the original, which I enjoy more (while currently I'm not good enough to deliberately 'hunt' the saucers anyway).
Now I know you are being hyperbolic.
Now if you are old enough you can take yourself back to those glorious days of fine Texas gals only a year or two out of high school wearing their Daisy Dukes and halter tops or rock-n-roll concert t-shirts. You're the guy with the hot rod 4x4 truck or the newish muscle car and several speeding tickets.
Of course the guy who got all the gals back then had the Good Times Chevy van with the captains chairs and the bed in back with a bumper sticker that said "No gas, no grass, no ass. No free ride." Or maybe the sticker that came out just before all the Jesus people gained a voice in the Reagan years that pictured a baby boy grabbing something in his crotch with the caption "I found it!" It was intended to mock all those people who were being "saved" by the tv preachers and tent revivalists that used to be common. That's where I grew up. Times sure have changed. A lot for the better. A lot for the not so better too.
That took me back a few years. My Dad's cousin had a 7-Eleven franchise when Southland Corp. still owned them. We could drop in any time and get a Slurpee, Big Gulp, a Tony's heat-em-up pizza, or like he mentions in the video - some nachos with all that chili and cheese. Wow.
The one in my home town was remodeled by the owner after it became obvious that people would be standing around the arcade games dropping quarters all day long if you'd let them. He made it convenient. He added a wall inside the store that led all the people who thought they were just stopping for gas and a quick piss right past the row of arcade games. Many of them stopped long enough to spend a quarter or two more than they thought they would when they stopped there.
Not much to do in that town but make the drag - literally drive back and forth all night on the main highway thru town hoping to attract free beer, lonely women, or some dipshit who thought his car was faster than yours. The pool hall was downtown and the highways in were lined with beer joints and bbq shacks. Pretty good combination when resources were pooled.
From the click-clack in the video I'm thinking his girlfriend Mindy shot the video. I wish I had owned a video camera back in the day. All I have are still photos and memories. Thanks for jogging my memory.
We used to play in the back room of a barber shop, of all things. Not much in the way of amenities, but he was the only guy who had the foresight to get some games, what can I say?
Some businesses were right on top of the trend for arcade games. Good times.
There was another vector 3D game called Red Barron.
It wasn't until many years later (decades) when it occurred to me how nasty that Battlezone viewport was. You had to literally stick your eyes and nose into the think and press your face onto the plastic. Some of us worry about those Dyson hand dryers in bathrooms sometimes. They can't hold a candle next to Battlezone!
I saw a panel a week ago in Portland with a bunch of ex-Atari engineers at the PRGE 2018. One of them, Ed Rotberg now retired, was the creator of Battlezone. Atari actually got recruited by the military to do a similar simulator afterwards. (He hated the project and nearly quit but shipped their product.)
My local 7-Eleven had the same ones with the addition of Pole Position and Tempest.
Oh, I wish that was true. My small town had Frogger...
Awesome game.
It definitely is not the same on the emulator but it is still a huge amount of fun. There are so many ways to play - try to stay in one spot for as long as possible blasting rocks; spend the entire time moving and blasting everything as you pass hoping for the best; sit and spin firing randomly in that instant before the spaceship appears on the off chance that your wild shot may hit it.
I also love Galaga. I was so glad to see that on the Roku. We still play that game regularly.
in my early twenties, i was good enough that i could play for hours. i could have like 50 or 60 extra ships piled up, going all the way across the screen. my longest game on a single quarter was nine hours. i finally had to stop because i was hallucinating.
based on that, i can say for certain that, no, there is only one right way to play, assuming you want to get good enough that the game can't get rid of you.
first, you have to get really good at flying your ship around. you must use the flight mechanic to your best advantage, so you can position that ship as easily as you can drive a car.
second, you have to get good at hunting the small saucers. i knew several good players who used different strategies, but the most reliable was to get rid of most of the rocks, fly slowly left to right across the screen, and learn how to "strafe." you were allowed a maximum of four bullets onscreen at once. you have to learn to press the fire button so quickly that all four of them line up together, which you gracefully place in the path of an oncoming saucer, so that it has no choice but to fly into your sheet of bullets.
i can't play the game at all anymore. my reaction times have gotten way too slow. also, after about 30 minutes, the tendons in my wrists start to hurt. the game makes you hold your hands in a very unnatural way.
i exchanged emails with ed logg once. he offered to sell me his original prototype asteroids machine, the one he developed the game on. i was not interested. i love the game and all, but not enough to haul around a 600-pound boat anchor for the rest of my life.
Your method of staying alive sounds a lot like mine. Make good use of salvos, follow the rocks as they near the edge of the screen while blasting them and just before they reach the edge pivot to face the emerging edge and begin blasting so that many never made the jump. Also, when you get down to the last couple of rocks just put yourself behind them moving in the same direction as you destroy them and accelerate as the last one falls. Then use a slow fan salvo as you rotate and glide to try to score the spaceship but get ready for a quick pivot if you're out of position.
I also am not near as fast on the uptake but that doesn't keep me from getting caught up in it. I have a Wii, an XBox360, numerous pc games and a Steam account, and that Atari emulator. Asteroids is always a favorite. I'll never forget the awesome feeling I had when I sat down to an Apple IIc in my first college computer science programming class and started following the simple instructions we had been given to draw an object and move it around on the screen in Logo or Turtle or something like that.
I was getting a glimpse of the process behind making a game like Asteroids and I went from a person who had no interest in anything having to do with computers to someone who has now spent his life in an industry that depends on high performance computing.
I liked Megaroids too on the Atari ST!
The Secret Life of Vector Generators: http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm
And it's companion piece, the Secret Life of XY Monitors: http://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm
I can remember it also came with a version of Asteroids. This had the CRT magic you describe but despite the charm it looked a bit like an oscilloscope to me. I played this in Woolworths circa 1982 when the thing to buy was a 'proper computer' even if that meant a ZX81 that you soldered yourself.
If I can remember correctly the Vectrex was price competitive with the humble ZX81 when new, now they are bound to be worth a relative fortune compared to those allegedly more useful computers that are worth little.
Size was also good, you could have a Vectrex on your desk, an Asteroids cabinet would be a bit too bulky for that.
I also find it kind of funny that these are museum pieces now. I played a lot of Asteroids as a 12-year-old - the neighborhood indoor archery range bought or leased one, and nearly every day after school there was a small gaggle of kids playing it. This and "Battlezone" were part of my arcade gaming coming-of-age in the early 80s.
Basically, most kids nowadays will just walk up to Battlezone, wiggle the sticks for 2 seconds, which just pivots/vibrates the tank for 2 seconds, then they give up. (A few adults were like this too.) Of the kids who didn't give up, there was one who didn't figure out the 3D world also existed out of the field of view. He asked of the radar screen, "What's that clock thing in the top?" ("It's a radar screen." -- blank look. "It's a minimap." -- Comprehension!)
I have a MMO Asteroids style game up online. At one point, I hired a high school aged kid to do testing. His first reaction: It doesn't go where I point it! It's impossible to strafe! For the younger kids reading this comment 1) is the point of the mechanic and 2) It's not, if you grok basic physics.
I've noted that the "Asteroids" movement mechanic is generally hugely bastardized and dumbed down for modern audiences in today's games, to the point that it breaks the expectations of anyone who has skill with the mechanic in Asteroids. "Heat Signature," and "SPAZ" are two examples of this.
Wow. And I thought the youngest generation was pretty quick when it came to figuring out interfaces and liked old-school games.
Maybe the interest is limited to pseudo old-school interfaces based on blocky graphics, like Minecraft or Nintendo-ish platformers?
I think that mostly has to do with subculture and what one's peers are interested in. I never had that much interest in platforming mechanics. (Honestly, I'm about as bad as that game journalist who got called out for his clumsiness with the Cuphead tutorial.) To a lot of hardcore "gamers" that marks me as a non-gamer. However, my clumsiness with platform mechanics isn't any different than most other's illiteracy with the Asteroid movement mechanic. It's just that certain mechanics are subscribed to and practiced more than others.
Also, most successful games nowadays come with fairly extensive tutorials, and even if they don't but are still popular, then there are tons of YouTube videos which can be used as reference. In the 80's, you just had instructions printed on the arcade console and a few screens animating basic game mechanics. We figured things out because we had to, or we got advice from friends who figured things out. In 2018, there are so many games, no one really knows what to do with them all, so you skip over everything that doesn't grab you immediately or you go and do what all your friends are doing.
So yeah, they probably would be as quick, but in 2018, only a very few are going to bother.
Watch kids deal with screens now. They will walk up and put a finger on it and if nothing happens immediately lose interest. They simply don’t do any interface that isn’t exactly like a modern smartphone. Even typing on keyboards.
They would regularly go off-site and just brainstorm everything they could think of. It all went into a large binder. When someone needed a new idea or concept, the book was there.
The gel-overlays were an inspired solution to making the displays more interesting.
It's roughly the same technology as a CRT, except instead of periodic scan lines, the "beam aimer" can dynamically point to wherever it wants on the screen. It's kind of like some laser shows.
I'd love to see one again and show it to my (grown) kids.
Battle zone, tempest, Star Trek and some game with vector blimps and space squids (world war vi?). How did the mame output which is usually to a crt translate to your projector?
You can look in the commits here to see how MAME is hooked to the projector. https://github.com/jv4779/openlase-mame/commits/master
I believe the jist of it is MAME already has to start with lines meant for a vector display and rasterize them one way or another for a modern computer. Before this happens, the data can sent to the openlase library[2] which generates signals on 5 channels of audio: 2 channels for control of X and Y galvos, and 3 channels for red, green, and blue laser power control. These signals then get sent to amplifiers and then to galvos and laser controls.
[1] http://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/ [2] https://github.com/marcan/openlase
This was the early 80s and they had a cocktail version of Asteroids. I mastered it! I could play it all day!
One of my favorites to this day, along with Gauntlet, STUN Runner and VR Racing/Daytona USA.