Mind Your Wing Mirrors! It's Asteroids!

Posted by: Paul Smith

Imagine the scary music from Jaws, but played on a cardiac monitoring machine in a hospital corridor. That is the enigmatic sound of all round minimalist Asteroids, track five on our journey through Buckner and Garcia's Pac Man Fever album. The track - Hyperspace - is so bad that we are better off promising never to mention it again, but no fag-smoke and Lilt-can infested early 80s arcade would be complete without the game itself. The stark and distinctive line drawing graphics look they way they do because Asteroids is a 'vector' game. Vectoring is a method that games programmers at the time used as a clever way to make their graphics look really, really bad. In this instance, however, it works very well, and, combined with the medical equipment audio set up, gives a fair representation of the bleakness of fighting a lonely battle you will inevitably lose in the bleak and chilly depths of space.

It turns out, however, that the battle, although undeniably a lonely one, is not quite as inevitably lost as it first appears. In fact, Asteroids is the only game in which it is relatively easy to play indefinitely - or until the cabinet fell apart, the screen burned out, or the player lapsed in to a coma or starved to death - on a single credit. In common with many early games in which distributors underestimated a) how popular the game would become and b) the expertise of the players playing them, it was possible to exploit many bugs and oversights left in by programmers. For example, the player could park his spaceship in the area of the screen in which the score was displayed, and not be hit by anything whatsoever. Also, the graphics scrolled and wrapped around themselves - that is to say, an asteroid floating off the left hand side would appear in the corresponding location on the right - which allowed clued-up practitioners to execute snazzy risk-free shooting manoeuvres. This was an especially useful tactic when employed against the flying saucers which habitually charged across the screen, shooting directly at the player.

Asteroids wasn't about flying saucers, though. It was about asteroids. Relentless, remorseless asteroids. Asteroids without end. Asteroids which, when you shot them, simply turned into smaller asteroids, which, when you shot them, turned into even smaller asteroids, colliding and careening at random all over the place. Amid this maelstrom of brutalist graphics span the player with his ridiculously underpowered craft, blazing away at the eternal rockstorm with his rubbish little lazer. He had to be pretty quick on the draw, too, as anything other than rotating on the spot was very tricky. It was possible to move the ship by pressing the 'thrust' button; however, it would continue to glide under its own momentum unless the player counterthrusted, or checked the forward drift by the more usual method of hitting an asteroid and disintegrating.

Because of the exploitable bugs in early versions of the game, top scores for Asteroids are among the biggest numbers the world has ever seen. The official high score is 41,336,440 points, scored by 15 year old Scott Safran, who would have been 9 when he commenced his record breaking game. Safran, playing for a muscular distrophy charity, ended the game voluntarily and with several ships in hand, as he was just so very bored. It is officially the longest standing high score in gaming history, but when Twin Galaxies - an organisation that maintains data on this kind of thing - attempted to honour Safran in 2002, they discovered that he had died thirteen years previously, after falling from a balcony during a botched domestic pet rescue. The award was instead presented to family members at a ceremony in Philadelphia. His record is considered simply too difficult to ever be broken, although, in the most roundabout way possible, perhaps Asteroids - the motherboard that could not defeat him in a straight fight - had the last laugh, after all.

 

Check out the RetroGT Asteroids T-Shirt.

 

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