Asteroids (Arcade)

While releasing in 1979 does make Asteroids one of the earliest well known video games ever made, it always felt a little older than that to me, mainly because it surprisingly came after the more visually distinct Space Invaders. While that game had multiple designs for its aliens, Asteroids is just a minor evolution of the games that inspired it like Spacewar! and Computer Space. Even if it’s slightly less old than expected, Asteroids is still undoubtedly one of the first huge arcade hits and certainly looks the part of one of the video game medium’s oldest titles.

Piloting a triangular ship through a mostly empty black screen meant to represent space, the player’s goal is to take down any asteroid currently on screen. Asteroids will drift around space with little concern for where the player is, but as the spaceship opens fire on them, the rocks will split into smaller bits of debris, pieces of them flinging off in different directions to make the play area more hazardous. The player needs to move their little vessel around to avoid making deadly contact with the drifting rocks, movement controlled by rotating the ship around and activating a thruster to send the craft heading towards wherever the spaceship is pointing. Even after releasing the thruster button the ship will continue to drift on its own unless effort is taken to slow it down, managing this drifting movement while firing on the rocks being the main concern while playing Asteroids. If you find yourself in the path of a rock you don’t think you can avoid though, you always have an emergency hyper space button that will teleport you to a random part of the screen, not necessarily to safety but at least away from whatever trouble inspired the use of the last resort option.

Both the asteroids and the player’s craft are able to move around the edges of the screen freely, the screen wrapping around on both ends so that leaving from one side will have the object appear from the parallel side. While this can be used to your advantage it mainly makes the flight of the asteroids more dangerous, especially when they get reduced to smaller and smaller forms. Eventually you will destroy a rock for good without it splitting further, but if a player isn’t careful, the screen can quickly become filled with a ton of tiny debris that will be a bit hard to accurately dodge. The big appeal of Asteroids though is that even as you enter new levels that just throw in different amounts of asteroids or places them differently to start, you have some degree of control over how dangerous things get. You can focus on one rock and the pieces that break off of it, open fire on whatever you can land a shot on, or wait for the rocks to move into a position where you can open fire rapidly to destroy a lot of debris. There aren’t really that many options admittedly, but having control over the current difficulty is interesting, the player able to leave big rocks drifting slowly about if they want to focus on only having a few of the tiny speedy ones zipping around at a time. It’s that small degree of controlling the action that keeps Asteroids from growing stale despite it not really having the complexity or openness to strategy that would make play sessions feel incredibly diverse.

Asteroids aren’t the only thing to worry about in Asteroids. To keep the player active, the game has some UFOs it will deploy at timed intervals, the player needing to shoot these down as well to complete a level. When these begin to appear they’ll mostly be the dopier large flying saucers whose shots have little purpose behind them, making them easy pickings save for any unlucky moments that might arise. However, soon a much smaller flying saucer joins the game and will actively try to hunt your craft down, it not only more difficult to hit with your laser but firing its lasers towards you and at a faster rate. The incursion of these aliens really help Asteroids from losing its luster, because while drifting rocks in space can be a bit dangerous, having to act fast or facing off with some actually aggressive enemies motivates the player to try and clear a stage’s asteroids more quickly and efficiently. Asteroids is a game that produces new levels infinitely until the player loses, the difficulty progression and the number of asteroids that appear tied to their current score, but every 10,000 points an extra life can be gained to increase the odds of a play session lasting even longer. Funnily enough, while the game has little issue producing the looping levels, collecting too many lives can lead to the game mistakenly thinking a player has run out and ending an excellent run, although hitting this point is only something the most devoted high score chasers would ever have a chance of seeing. However, that freedom to earn so many lives does leave this game open to playing for an incredibly high amount of points so long as you can hang in there as the play field continues to get more crowded.

Asteroids’s simplicity makes it an easy arcade cabinet to approach and play for a bit, the UFOs adding some spice to the play as well, but there is one appealing aspect of the arcade machine that sadly doesn’t transfer well to screenshots. The black and white look of Asteroids keeps things simple and easily readable, the outline look not exciting but serving the function of making the rocks, shots, player ship, and flying saucers all look distinct from each other. Laser shots have a special flair to them though that make them stand out on the arcade screen, glowing with a dazzling light that gives some life to a fairly plain looking play field. The shots from the UFOs use it as well so you can almost say there is a practical purpose to making the shots stand out, and considering how packed the game can get when even the intact large rocks start appearing in high numbers, it’s not too bad to have this minor edge to avoiding death. While you do have that degree of control over the game’s difficulty by choosing how many rocks to split with your shots, the game soon makes it harder to do so as screen real estate is frequently packed to begin a stage and you’ll soon be interrupted by a UFO that makes it so you can’t destroy asteroids at your leisure. With a heartbeat like sound speeding up as the number of asteroids left to destroy diminishes, the game really pushes you to be quick in clearing levels even if it’s not in your best interest.

THE VERDICT: While Asteroids does get harder and harder as the new stages bring in more rocks to blast and UFOs to shoot you down, what keeps this simple game appealing is that you control some of the chaos. Your shots split the asteroids in hard to predict ways but you choose when you want to start splitting the large space rocks. The game is still incredibly simple despite this and some of its generosity with earning extra lives is tempered by how packed the screen gets with danger as you progress, but Asteroids has a decent foundation that allows it to still be a decent play even now albeit one that all but the most committed high score chaser will move on from as its basic design fails to entertain for long.

And so, I give Asteroids for arcade machines…

An OKAY rating. When I say something features simple arcade fun, it’s usually because I’m thinking of a game like Asteroids where the design works for a small bit of play but lacks that degree of evolution or complexity that would keep you playing it beyond a few quick play sessions. It’s basic because it was created while the video game medium was still emerging, but its name stuck around because it was built well enough that a few minutes playing it gives you enough to chew on, the player able to walk away having had a fairly decent time. The goal is simple but you can impact how much danger you are in by the way you shoot the space rocks, but the flying saucers still exist to push play styles that might be too slow or cautious into trying to manage the difficulty. Asteroids isn’t easy despite its simplicity either and that allows it to keep some of its appeal, the push to get further next time more of a motivation than chasing high scores that will often be set by a player who has really mastered the few mechanics and found the time to commit to a score too high to chase. Having the lives as an incentive does encourage trying to keep racking up points, although that’s a process inherently tied to progression since every rock has a set value and the only thing that isn’t guaranteed to provide points in a new stage would be the variable amount of UFOs you can shoot down before moving on.

Like many old games Asteroids would see imitators and sequels that build off its groundwork and try to make a simple game into something with the longevity and variation that would make them more appealing than their arcade ancestor. Asteroids does do alright with what it has though, this primitive space shooter having enough variability to it that it doesn’t get old even if it can’t really shake up the experience too much after it’s just tossed a bunch of extra rocks into the midst of things. Still, it’s always a little comforting to know that such an old arcade legend like Asteroids can still hold up somewhat in the modern day, showing that even way back in the 1970s there was some understanding of what could make a game stand the test of time.