Asteroids is a classic arcade game developed and published by Atari in 1979 and is one of Atari's best selling games of all time.

Asteroids has a many interesting features that made help make it the arcade classic that it is today. Asteroids use of vector graphics while quite basic today was very new and exciting in the late 70s. Asteroids featured a wrap around screen where flying off one side would result in the player appearing on the other. The controls where fun too, you needed to rotate your ship to point the direction you wanted to go and then fire the thrusters. A bit different from the straight up, down, left and right directional controls of many games of the time.
The goal of Asteroids is to survive as long as possible in an asteroid filled area of space and earning points by blasting asteroids with the forward pointing gun on your space ship. Each level would start of with several slow moving large asteroids randomly floating about. As you shoot the asteroids they would break apart into smaller, faster moving asteroids. Colliding with an asteroid would destroy the players ship and they would lose a life.

Periodically hostile flying saucers will invade the play area. Some of the flying saucers will openly shoot at the player. Skilled players could shoot down these flying saucers for bonus points.
The players space ship also featured a hyper space drive. If the situation looks dire and there is no possible means of escape the player can thrust them selves into the mercy of hyper space! The players space ship will disappear from the screen and enter hyper space to moments later return randomly. Since the new location is random and could land you directly in the path of an asteroid it is best used as a last ditch effort to escape certain death

Once a level has been cleared of asteroids a new level is started. Each level the number of starting asteroids is increased to increase the difficulty.This continues until the player runs out of lives.

So lets get ready to clone the classic arcade game Asteroids

1. Specification
2. Play Asteroids