About Asteroids, Atari's biggest arcade hit
goto10retro.com
goto10retro.com
Saucer hunting was, essentially, the degenerate game play that base Asteroids reduced down to when you were playing for score.
The game was to leave a last, single, small rock floating about, and wait for the fast, 1000 point saucers to show up.
The trick was that the saucers were very fast, and very accurate. So the solution was to essentially hold down the thrust button, and race from bottom to top (since the ship rolled over the edges, rather than bounced off).
When a saucer showed up, you had to quickly react, point the ship in the right direction, just a bit off axis, and blast the saucer with a stream of bullets.
I was never particularly good at that myself, but my friend was. That's how you got on the high score boards in the local arcades back in the day.
Interestingly though, years later they had to similarly release an update to Gauntlet Legends for just about the same reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_(video_game)#Lurking...
Arcade operators began to complain about losing revenue due to this exploit. In response, Atari issued a patched EPROM and, due to the impact of this exploit, Atari (and other companies) changed their development and testing policies to try to prevent future games from having such exploits.
> because arcade operators complained that people were playing too much on one credit,
Other scores did other things, including opening all of the levels to the end game (that was a fun week when that leaked, all of the high score boards all over town were wrecked).
But the 40 credit one was, I mean, freakin jackpot.
I remember when the operator at the student union at college cranked the game to its hardest difficulty. Didn't matter. That poor guy was lucky to get $2 a week from that machine. We'd crack it open every morning and just keep it that way all day long.
Kind of crazy to think one of the coolest things back in the day was battling other unknown or sometimes known teenagers for the highest scores on video games in arcades. I remember being really good at Pengo at one of the local pizza joints that my cousins loved going to. I remember saving as many quarters as possible as an 11 year old to make sure I could hold that high score until we came back a few weeks later.
I must thank you for that nugget as a HS friend and I inherited the 40 game jackpot a couple times and had no idea how. Any memory of what some of those specific scores were?
As I recall it as a score over 170,000 and ended with a 17. That gave you the 40 credits.
The level skip was 46, but it was tricky.
If you did the 17 trick, then that happened right away.
The 46 trick, you had to wait for once complete cycle of attract mode. You know that it worked because whatever level it was playing in attract mode, when it continued to the next level, the level was wrong. Like, it would start playing the circle, and then jump to the clover, rather than the square.
But, we "never" let that happen, because if you let it go through attract mode, you'd lose all of your level progress. So, we didn't let it do that. That's why it was trick to find what 46 did (and, trust me, we tried them all! lol).
Others are mentioned on the wikipedia page, where it mentions "some ROMs were shipped with glitches". Glitches!? HA! no, likely these were put it perhaps for debugging, but that's not clear. I think it was the coders pulling one over on management, personally. Whatever they were, they were consciously done. These weren't "glitches" or bugs.
Quote from him:
If players got something like 179,480 points, the game would crank a 40 into the coin counter. It would do other weird things, too, like double the vector generator multipliers so everything would be twice as big, but nobody wanted that. They just wanted to get the 40 free credits, so the kids figured out how to do it.
Useless tech point, but Gauntlet Legends was actually "new" enough to keep the game data on an IDE HDD. 1979 vs 1998 was a massively long time in technology terms, interesting to see some of the non-technical issues persisted.
For my money, this was the absolute best take on Asteroids since the original. Originally Mac, but the source was later released and was ported to PC. We even had a tweaked version that we called "Carnage" that generated many storms of presents, comets, spiky balls, etc.
Came here to mention Maelstrom. It's also in most of the main Linux distro repositories, too.
Tangentially there was a niche but slightly notorious port https://www.spheresofchaos.com/ that is appropriately named.
It seems crazy to me that modern hardware emulating 50 year old hardware can't match the performance characteristics. What could the problem be?
If you grew up playing Punch-Out on an old NES with the RF module to TV, you'll know how brutal even 20-30 ms of added latency can be if you play on the NES Classic Edition.
If it were not for the games industry it would be much worse, they are the only force incentivizing keeping latency within somewhat acceptable bounds. Things like FreeSync can help a lot.
The Secret Life of Vector Generators: https://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm
The Secret Life of XY Monitors: https://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm
"Part way through the run of Asteroids, we used up the world's supply of 7497s [binary rate multiplier chips] and Texas Instruments (the only manufacturer of 7497s) did not have them on their schedule to make more for several months"
It's probably not but such is the times we live in that it was what crossed my mind.
> Building a 1979 Asteroids arcade replica —https://www.henningludvigsen.com/index.php/2022/09/10/buildi...
I see no license, only a copyright notice. OP does not seem to give any credit for the image or mention it was used with permission
But it's not CGI..! Celebrate the small wins
"Gravitar is a color vector graphics multidirectional shooter arcade video game released by Atari, Inc. in 1982. Using the same "rotate-and-thrust" controls as Asteroids and Space Duel, the game was known for its high level of difficulty"
There is a two player game mode that is incredible: both players play simultaneously and there is a short rod connecting the ships together at all times. Chaos ensues as players thrust pointed in different directions, causing the two ships to spin around wildly. Good times.
I had never loved the game and found it merely quirky and interesting as an example of video game history, but something about the vivid cyan lines and the responsiveness of the vector display changed the experience and made it much more engaging. It didn’t just look better, it played better, and made me understand why it was such a big hit.
This really hit home for me. Having gravitated toward games with "simple" controls like PacMan, Crazy Climber, Space Invaders, Tron etc., I never evolved to master multiple button games like Defender, Asteroids etc.
For modern platforms, like Switch/Xbox/PS series, I'm hopelessly lost.
I remember images were free on yahoo auctions so I'd add images to those auctions, then hot link to the files on different places, like forums and basic sites where the hosting didn't allow for free images. Fun days!
there was a special ROM, a version of Asteroids just for him, where the rocks were changed to big, medium and small turtles
[0] https://www.polygon.com/2012/12/17/3776272/meteors-arcade-ca...
I always wondered why it didn't use a 2 way joystick (or even a spinner). Was it just meant to be awkward because it was too easy with a stick? Were they trying to save money? Did they think it would look different to attract people? Were people at the time complaining that they didn't like sticks?
The movement of the ship was not stop/start or spinleft/spinright.
A stick (left/right) or spinner (Tempest!) you expect instant results. The inertia of Asteroids would not have worked that way. The game needed more judgement, built on experience, of when to press and when to release.
Yes, a spinner would be functionally different (spinning is different from holding), but the question is really about the design choice from the beginning.
https://atari.com/products/atari-asteroids-recharged-arcadem...