Asteroids T-Shirt

Asteroids, created by Atari in 1979, was a hugely popular arcade game. The gameplay was inspired largely by the first computer-based game, 'Spacewar!', which was developed in 1962 at MIT.

The premise of Asteroids is relatively straight-forward. You pilot a spaceship, flying through an asteroid storm. Shoot the asteroids and they break up into smaller asteroids... and you can shoot those too. Occasionally, a UFO may take a pot-shot at you... It's simple, but addictive.

Asteroids was designed simultaneously with Atari's 'Lunar Lander', using the same hardware. Asteroids was released first however, and it's popularity was so great that Atari switched all production away from Lunar Lander in favour of the rock-shooting classic. So popular was Asteroids in fact, that arcade owners often had to fit larger boxes to their machines to collect all the money that people were pumping into them!