I wish I had a quarter of all the quarters I dropped down the slot in an Asteroids arcade cabinet. I just know I would go right out and find another machine and start blasting rocks.
The 7-Eleven where I grew up was just a convenient place to get a Slurpee or a Big Gulp before they got their first Asteroids machine. Word got out in the small town where I grew up and we would all take any opportunity to go down and try to beat the latest high score. Having your initials on the leader board would create jealousy among my male peers and desire among the females. Who wouldn't want to be seen with the high-score holder? We spent hours trying to outdo each other. Competition was fierce and taunting was normal behavior.
The store had several other machines over the years including Frogger, Space Invaders, Supreme Commander (is that a real one - the nuclear bomber game), Centipede, etc. and periodically the owner would rotate new machines in and old ones out. The one game that he had two of was Asteroids. It was extremely popular. Other places in town also got in on the arcade games bandwagon and before long you could play at the pool hall (spent a lot of time there too), almost every beer joint, and even some fast food joints. Anywhere you might see a crowd of people waiting for something became a great place to give them a way to spend their time and their quarters before you soaked them on the main event.
While working with one crew in town we passed our time gambling by pitching quarters. The quarter closest to the line would win all. We even used the lane stripes on the highway in some spots if the traffic was low or non-existent. There was no better feeling than getting off work with a shit-ton of someone else's quarters to drop in the slot.
I love that game. I bought an emulator version for my kids when they were old enough to understand video game controls and they love it too.
I worked with a guy in Houston several years ago and we were shooting the breeze when he mentioned that he had just bought several pinball machines to restore. I asked him what his favorite arcade game had been while he was growing up. He told me he only played pinball. I was hoping he could be my new best friend and we could hang out and waste time with his Asteroids game but nope, just another Pinball wizard loser. ;)
How common was the later revision (small saucer fires immediately when it appears, and can aim at you across the wrap around) compared to the original?
MAME makes the newest revision the 'default' (in terms of their ROM naming) so I sometimes feel like that's the one I 'ought' to play but it's very much harder than the original, which I enjoy more (while currently I'm not good enough to deliberately 'hunt' the saucers anyway).
I have aged a bit since then. I might be mis-remembering parts of those years and, being a Texan I might be prone to embellishment. But I implore the reader to picture if you can, a 7-Eleven with part of it walled off to form a narrow hallway leading to the bathrooms with a line of arcade games along one wall and just enough room in front of them for two players and couple of spectators to stand and almost enough room for another person to pass behind them without disturbing anyone.
Now if you are old enough you can take yourself back to those glorious days of fine Texas gals only a year or two out of high school wearing their Daisy Dukes and halter tops or rock-n-roll concert t-shirts. You're the guy with the hot rod 4x4 truck or the newish muscle car and several speeding tickets.
Of course the guy who got all the gals back then had the Good Times Chevy van with the captains chairs and the bed in back with a bumper sticker that said "No gas, no grass, no ass. No free ride." Or maybe the sticker that came out just before all the Jesus people gained a voice in the Reagan years that pictured a baby boy grabbing something in his crotch with the caption "I found it!" It was intended to mock all those people who were being "saved" by the tv preachers and tent revivalists that used to be common. That's where I grew up. Times sure have changed. A lot for the better. A lot for the not so better too.
That took me back a few years. My Dad's cousin had a 7-Eleven franchise when Southland Corp. still owned them. We could drop in any time and get a Slurpee, Big Gulp, a Tony's heat-em-up pizza, or like he mentions in the video - some nachos with all that chili and cheese. Wow.
The one in my home town was remodeled by the owner after it became obvious that people would be standing around the arcade games dropping quarters all day long if you'd let them. He made it convenient. He added a wall inside the store that led all the people who thought they were just stopping for gas and a quick piss right past the row of arcade games. Many of them stopped long enough to spend a quarter or two more than they thought they would when they stopped there.
Not much to do in that town but make the drag - literally drive back and forth all night on the main highway thru town hoping to attract free beer, lonely women, or some dipshit who thought his car was faster than yours. The pool hall was downtown and the highways in were lined with beer joints and bbq shacks. Pretty good combination when resources were pooled.
From the click-clack in the video I'm thinking his girlfriend Mindy shot the video. I wish I had owned a video camera back in the day. All I have are still photos and memories. Thanks for jogging my memory.
That is just like what I remember. Same time frame too, 1979-1983ish. That is what the store looked like just after school got out for the day and for most of the day during the summer. Young kids jockeying for turns at the machines, pointing out their high scores, etc. I was older than these kids by a few years. Thanks for this!
We used to play in the back room of a barber shop, of all things. Not much in the way of amenities, but he was the only guy who had the foresight to get some games, what can I say?
Yes! That's it. Missile Command. That and the one where you are the tank driver and you keep having to blast those stick-figure tanks into their respective lines - BattleZone I think.
Some businesses were right on top of the trend for arcade games. Good times.
I had trouble getting my face up to the viewport for that game, but I loved the look and feel of it. When I later got a Vectrex in about 1982, I thought I had my own Battlezone right in my house. Minestorm was a great little Asteroids clone, too.
It wasn't until many years later (decades) when it occurred to me how nasty that Battlezone viewport was. You had to literally stick your eyes and nose into the think and press your face onto the plastic. Some of us worry about those Dyson hand dryers in bathrooms sometimes. They can't hold a candle next to Battlezone!
I saw a panel a week ago in Portland with a bunch of ex-Atari engineers at the PRGE 2018. One of them, Ed Rotberg now retired, was the creator of Battlezone. Atari actually got recruited by the military to do a similar simulator afterwards. (He hated the project and nearly quit but shipped their product.)
>The store had several other machines over the years including Frogger, Space Invaders, Supreme Commander (is that a real one - the nuclear bomber game), Centipede, etc. and periodically the owner would rotate new machines in and old ones out.
My local 7-Eleven had the same ones with the addition of Pole Position and Tempest.
I remember those too now that you mention them. Our 7-Eleven owner rotated games out if they weren't getting much traffic. We regularly had new games show up but one constant was Asteroids. All of us played and every time someone was knocked off the board you could bet that quarters would drop until someone fell and their place in the list was restored.
Ah man. Awesome stories. The thing I remember about Asteroids was that it looked like nothing else. The straight lines and glow of the vectors were hypnotic.
Exactly. The anticipation you felt knowing that you were a carefully timed shot away from being attacked by the spaceship; the feature that allowed you to shoot past the edge of the screen and hit rocks before they crossed the edge in front of you; the sad feeling seeing your ship in fragments and the frantic check of the screen to see how many you had left.
Awesome game.
It definitely is not the same on the emulator but it is still a huge amount of fun. There are so many ways to play - try to stay in one spot for as long as possible blasting rocks; spend the entire time moving and blasting everything as you pass hoping for the best; sit and spin firing randomly in that instant before the spaceship appears on the off chance that your wild shot may hit it.
I also love Galaga. I was so glad to see that on the Roku. We still play that game regularly.
oh boy, can't believe i am going to do this. but. if there is one topic i am qualified to write about, it is asteroids.
in my early twenties, i was good enough that i could play for hours. i could have like 50 or 60 extra ships piled up, going all the way across the screen. my longest game on a single quarter was nine hours. i finally had to stop because i was hallucinating.
based on that, i can say for certain that, no, there is only one right way to play, assuming you want to get good enough that the game can't get rid of you.
first, you have to get really good at flying your ship around. you must use the flight mechanic to your best advantage, so you can position that ship as easily as you can drive a car.
second, you have to get good at hunting the small saucers. i knew several good players who used different strategies, but the most reliable was to get rid of most of the rocks, fly slowly left to right across the screen, and learn how to "strafe." you were allowed a maximum of four bullets onscreen at once. you have to learn to press the fire button so quickly that all four of them line up together, which you gracefully place in the path of an oncoming saucer, so that it has no choice but to fly into your sheet of bullets.
i can't play the game at all anymore. my reaction times have gotten way too slow. also, after about 30 minutes, the tendons in my wrists start to hurt. the game makes you hold your hands in a very unnatural way.
i exchanged emails with ed logg once. he offered to sell me his original prototype asteroids machine, the one he developed the game on. i was not interested. i love the game and all, but not enough to haul around a 600-pound boat anchor for the rest of my life.
You are the king! I could line up a sizable collection of expendable ships but nothing like that. Nine hours would definitely not have been a 25 cent adventure for me.
Your method of staying alive sounds a lot like mine. Make good use of salvos, follow the rocks as they near the edge of the screen while blasting them and just before they reach the edge pivot to face the emerging edge and begin blasting so that many never made the jump. Also, when you get down to the last couple of rocks just put yourself behind them moving in the same direction as you destroy them and accelerate as the last one falls. Then use a slow fan salvo as you rotate and glide to try to score the spaceship but get ready for a quick pivot if you're out of position.
I also am not near as fast on the uptake but that doesn't keep me from getting caught up in it. I have a Wii, an XBox360, numerous pc games and a Steam account, and that Atari emulator. Asteroids is always a favorite. I'll never forget the awesome feeling I had when I sat down to an Apple IIc in my first college computer science programming class and started following the simple instructions we had been given to draw an object and move it around on the screen in Logo or Turtle or something like that.
I was getting a glimpse of the process behind making a game like Asteroids and I went from a person who had no interest in anything having to do with computers to someone who has now spent his life in an industry that depends on high performance computing.
oddly enough, i also wrote an asteroids clone, in C for DOS, using VGA graphics. i am not mathematically inclined, so writing the routines that allowed the ship to act exactly as it did in the original, subject to friction and thrust, nearly killed me. i’ve still got the code around here somewhere.
huh, i always wondered about that! he seemed in a pretty big hurry to unload it at the time. i suggested some people who might actually want it, but i didn’t email with him for very long.
If you look at the letter from Thomas M. Saunders, Esq. towards the middle of the page, you'll notice a handwritten reference to Skip Paul. This is the same Skip Paul who championed our game, 13 years later, while a senior executive at Universal Studios -- and who in fact decided the character of Crash should be a bandicoot rather than a wombat. (The article also quotes Mark Cerny, who was our producer, and who was brought in to Universal by Skip.)
If you haven't seen an Asteroids cabinet in action, I suggest you find one at an arcade museum near you. Actual Asteroids is quite different from any port or emulation of it. The slow-decay phosphor leaves visible trails for your ship and shots, and the machine has control over electron-beam intensity in a way that raster units do not, which means that your shots and enemy saucers glitter in the dark, creating a "spacey" atmosphere that's hard to replicate on a raster display.
Maybe you should invest in a Vectrex, the only vector console.
I can remember it also came with a version of Asteroids. This had the CRT magic you describe but despite the charm it looked a bit like an oscilloscope to me. I played this in Woolworths circa 1982 when the thing to buy was a 'proper computer' even if that meant a ZX81 that you soldered yourself.
If I can remember correctly the Vectrex was price competitive with the humble ZX81 when new, now they are bound to be worth a relative fortune compared to those allegedly more useful computers that are worth little.
Size was also good, you could have a Vectrex on your desk, an Asteroids cabinet would be a bit too bulky for that.
I love that the proposal fit on a one-page mimeographed form.
I also find it kind of funny that these are museum pieces now. I played a lot of Asteroids as a 12-year-old - the neighborhood indoor archery range bought or leased one, and nearly every day after school there was a small gaggle of kids playing it. This and "Battlezone" were part of my arcade gaming coming-of-age in the early 80s.
I was a volunteer at a video game museum. I was also a kid playing Space War, Asteroids, and Battlezone. There's a big difference between kids nowadays and kids back then, in terms of how much problem solving and science they're willing to do to figure out a game!
Basically, most kids nowadays will just walk up to Battlezone, wiggle the sticks for 2 seconds, which just pivots/vibrates the tank for 2 seconds, then they give up. (A few adults were like this too.) Of the kids who didn't give up, there was one who didn't figure out the 3D world also existed out of the field of view. He asked of the radar screen, "What's that clock thing in the top?" ("It's a radar screen." -- blank look. "It's a minimap." -- Comprehension!)
I have a MMO Asteroids style game up online. At one point, I hired a high school aged kid to do testing. His first reaction: It doesn't go where I point it! It's impossible to strafe! For the younger kids reading this comment 1) is the point of the mechanic and 2) It's not, if you grok basic physics.
I've noted that the "Asteroids" movement mechanic is generally hugely bastardized and dumbed down for modern audiences in today's games, to the point that it breaks the expectations of anyone who has skill with the mechanic in Asteroids. "Heat Signature," and "SPAZ" are two examples of this.
Basically, most kids nowadays will just walk up to Battlezone, wiggle the sticks for 2 seconds, which just pivots/vibrates the tank for 2 seconds, then they give up. (A few adults were like this too.) Of the kids who didn't give up, there was one who didn't figure out the 3D world also existed out of the field of view.
Wow. And I thought the youngest generation was pretty quick when it came to figuring out interfaces and liked old-school games.
Maybe the interest is limited to pseudo old-school interfaces based on blocky graphics, like Minecraft or Nintendo-ish platformers?
Wow. And I thought the youngest generation was pretty quick when it came to figuring out interfaces and liked old-school games.
I think that mostly has to do with subculture and what one's peers are interested in. I never had that much interest in platforming mechanics. (Honestly, I'm about as bad as that game journalist who got called out for his clumsiness with the Cuphead tutorial.) To a lot of hardcore "gamers" that marks me as a non-gamer. However, my clumsiness with platform mechanics isn't any different than most other's illiteracy with the Asteroid movement mechanic. It's just that certain mechanics are subscribed to and practiced more than others.
Also, most successful games nowadays come with fairly extensive tutorials, and even if they don't but are still popular, then there are tons of YouTube videos which can be used as reference. In the 80's, you just had instructions printed on the arcade console and a few screens animating basic game mechanics. We figured things out because we had to, or we got advice from friends who figured things out. In 2018, there are so many games, no one really knows what to do with them all, so you skip over everything that doesn't grab you immediately or you go and do what all your friends are doing.
So yeah, they probably would be as quick, but in 2018, only a very few are going to bother.
I thought the youngest generation was pretty quick when it came to figuring out interfaces
Watch kids deal with screens now. They will walk up and put a finger on it and if nothing happens immediately lose interest. They simply don’t do any interface that isn’t exactly like a modern smartphone. Even typing on keyboards.
Unlike a lot of other game companies of the era, Atari was actually very methodical and kept lots of records.
They would regularly go off-site and just brainstorm everything they could think of. It all went into a large binder. When someone needed a new idea or concept, the book was there.
If you have never seen one, I strongly recommend seeking out a real vector arcade machine. The monitor has a beautiful, otherworldly appearance that can't be captured in photos or emulation. Somehow the lack of the raster grid makes the image feel more tangible. In an arcade the vector machines have an aura that even the best raster machines don't have.
For me, it's the intensity and brightness that really stand out. In Asteroids, the ship and rocks are clear, smoothly drawn straight lines, but the shots from enemy ships are intensely bright points that actually make a small circle around it on the CRT also glow faintly.
The first time someone sees what Asteroids really looks like is pretty special. Those ridiculously bright bullets burn themselves into your retina in a way that simply can't be emulated.
Vector game monitors created a look that's either impossible or really hard emulate well with pixel-based monitors and scan-line-based CRT's. A beam of electrons can dwell on a single spot or narrow area for a relatively long period of time, making it glow mega-bright.
It's roughly the same technology as a CRT, except instead of periodic scan lines, the "beam aimer" can dynamically point to wherever it wants on the screen. It's kind of like some laser shows.
I'd love to see one again and show it to my (grown) kids.
A buddy of mine built his own RGB laser projector for about $400 back in 2013 or so, and got MAME to work with it. But the games typically try to draw too many lines for a laser projector to keep up with, so you either need multiple, and split up the lines among the projectors and carefully align the projectors. Anyway we learned that filming laser projections is hard, and doesn't look like it does in real life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2JKr-Vkz8A
Very cool. A lot of games i forgot we’re cector based.
Battle zone, tempest, Star Trek and some game with vector blimps and space squids (world war vi?). How did the mame output which is usually to a crt translate to your projector?
Word War vi[1] is a little game I made long before the laser projector, and we were looking for things to do with the projector, so I converted word war vi to be able to use it.
I believe the jist of it is MAME already has to start with lines meant for a vector display and rasterize them one way or another for a modern computer. Before this happens, the data can sent to the openlase library[2] which generates signals on 5 channels of audio: 2 channels for control of X and Y galvos, and 3 channels for red, green, and blue laser power control. These signals then get sent to amplifiers and then to galvos and laser controls.
I had always assumed that Asteroids was a spin-off of Space War, seeing as the latter also used vector graphics and one of the player ships was the same design as the Asteroids ship. I loved Space War, but it was incredibly rare (in the UK)
The 7-Eleven where I grew up was just a convenient place to get a Slurpee or a Big Gulp before they got their first Asteroids machine. Word got out in the small town where I grew up and we would all take any opportunity to go down and try to beat the latest high score. Having your initials on the leader board would create jealousy among my male peers and desire among the females. Who wouldn't want to be seen with the high-score holder? We spent hours trying to outdo each other. Competition was fierce and taunting was normal behavior.
The store had several other machines over the years including Frogger, Space Invaders, Supreme Commander (is that a real one - the nuclear bomber game), Centipede, etc. and periodically the owner would rotate new machines in and old ones out. The one game that he had two of was Asteroids. It was extremely popular. Other places in town also got in on the arcade games bandwagon and before long you could play at the pool hall (spent a lot of time there too), almost every beer joint, and even some fast food joints. Anywhere you might see a crowd of people waiting for something became a great place to give them a way to spend their time and their quarters before you soaked them on the main event.
While working with one crew in town we passed our time gambling by pitching quarters. The quarter closest to the line would win all. We even used the lane stripes on the highway in some spots if the traffic was low or non-existent. There was no better feeling than getting off work with a shit-ton of someone else's quarters to drop in the slot.
I love that game. I bought an emulator version for my kids when they were old enough to understand video game controls and they love it too.
I worked with a guy in Houston several years ago and we were shooting the breeze when he mentioned that he had just bought several pinball machines to restore. I asked him what his favorite arcade game had been while he was growing up. He told me he only played pinball. I was hoping he could be my new best friend and we could hang out and waste time with his Asteroids game but nope, just another Pinball wizard loser. ;)