How to play Asteroids online
- Turn the ship: left and right arrow keys
- Thrust forward: up arrow
- Hyperspace: down arrow
- Fire: Z (either controller button fires)
- Choose game type and difficulty: on the title screen, up/down picks the game type (F2, Select, also works) and left/right the difficulty
- Start a game: F3 (Reset) or Z
- Pause: F4
- Full screen: F9
Only the USA (NTSC) cartridge is on this page.
Gameplay
Your ship starts in the middle of the screen. Shots travel in the direction the nose is pointing, and only four can be on screen at once, so wild spraying does not work. A large asteroid breaks into two medium ones, a medium one into two small ones, and small ones are destroyed outright. Clear the screen and a new, harder wave comes in from the edges.
Alien saucers, large and small, cross the screen and fire at random. Their shots destroy whatever they hit, rocks included. You start with three ships in reserve and earn another every 10,000 points. Hyperspace drops you at a random spot on the screen, and it can also destroy your ship, so treat it as a last resort. The game ends when your last ship is gone.
| Target | Points |
|---|---|
| Large asteroid | 20 |
| Medium asteroid | 50 |
| Small asteroid | 100 |
| Large saucer | 200 |
| Other player’s ship (Competition) | 500 |
| Small saucer | 1,000 |
Game types and difficulty levels
- Standard: one player, or two players taking turns.
- Competition: both ships fly at the same time and can shoot each other. Both players keep getting ships while either one still has reserves.
- Team: both ships fly at the same time and share the reserve ships. Your shots pass harmlessly through your partner.
There are four difficulty levels: Novice, Intermediate, Advanced and Expert. Novice has no saucers at all, and its medium and large rocks only shrink when hit instead of splitting, which makes it a gentle way to learn the controls.
Tips
- Deal with the closest rock first. A distant asteroid can wait. The one about to hit you cannot.
- Don’t break every big rock at once. Each hit doubles the number of pieces. Finish off the fragments of one rock before splitting the next.
- Use short bursts of thrust. There is no brake, so a long push sends you sliding into trouble. A quick tap is usually enough to dodge.
- In Team mode, split the screen. Stay near your partner in the centre and each cover one side, so nothing reaches either of you from behind.
The story behind Asteroids on the 7800
The 1979 arcade Asteroids drew everything as lines on a vector monitor, which cannot fill shapes with colour. For the 7800, a team at General Computer Corporation, the company that designed the console itself, rebuilt the game in 1984 with filled, shaded rocks. Its working title was 3-D Asteroids. The programmers credited by AtariProtos are Greg Munster, Doug Macrae, Mike Horowitz, Josh Littlefield and Ethan Jacobs.
The 7800 was announced in 1984 and then shelved when Jack Tramiel bought Atari, so the finished game had to wait for the console, which only reached US shops in 1986. Atari also built Asteroids into the European (PAL) 7800: switch the console on with no cartridge and this game starts. The three- and four-player modes of the Atari 8-bit computer version were left out, since the 7800 has only two controller ports.
Reviewing it in ANALOG magazine in 1988, Bill Kunkel praised the colourful shaded asteroids and judged it better than the earlier home versions for the 2600, 5200 and Atari computers.
