Asteroids

Game Info

Asteroids was inspired in a roundabout way by the seminal Spacewar, the first computer based video game. In the early 1980s a stand-up arcade game version was produced as Space Wars, which included a number of optional versions and added a floating asteroid as a visual device. Asteroids is essentially a one player version of Spacewar, featuring the "wedge" ship from the original and promoting the asteroids to be the main opponent.

Game Instructions

The player's controls consist of thrust and fire buttons, and rotate left/rotate right buttons (actually rotate counter-clockwise and rotate clockwise respectively). The momentum of the player's ship is not conserved, and it starts to slow down if thrust is not applied. There is also a hyperspace button, which randomly teleports the player's ship somewhere on the screen, with the risk of exploding upon rematerialization (or rematerializing inside an asteroid).

The player's ship spawns in the middle of the screen, with 4 large asteroids drifting around. Each large asteroid (20 points) breaks into 2 medium-sized ones (50 points) when shot, which in turn breaks into 2 small (100 points) asteroids.