Drift, shoot, survive the belt
The 1979 vector arcade classic. Your ship keeps its momentum, every asteroid you shoot splits into smaller ones, and flying saucers show up to hunt you down. Shattered rocks and downed saucers drop power-ups. Clear a wave without losing a ship for a perfect-wave bonus, and earn an extra life every 10000 points.
Asteroids is one of the defining arcade games of its era. Released by Atari in 1979, it drew crisp white outlines with a vector display instead of the blocky pixels of its contemporaries, and it became one of the highest-grossing coin-op machines ever built. Its look — a lone triangular ship adrift among rotating rocks — is still instantly recognisable decades later.
What made it stand out was physics. The ship carries momentum: thrust pushes it forward, but nothing slows it down, so stopping means turning around and burning in the opposite direction. Shooting a big rock does not remove it — it breaks into faster, smaller fragments, so a careless volley can fill the screen with debris that is far harder to dodge than the original.
The game is endless by design, which is why it became a scoreboard fixture: skilled players learn to thin the field patiently, save hyperspace for genuine emergencies, and treat the saucers as the real threat. Records ran into the millions and marathon sessions lasted for days, and the same appeal survives here — every run ends with a score you can measure against everyone else's.