from Hacker News

Atari Asteroids: Creating a Vector Arcade Classic

by videotopia on 10/26/18, 6:33 PM with 60 comments

• by doodlebugging on 10/26/18, 8:13 PM

  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. ;)

• by joezydeco on 10/26/18, 9:11 PM

  If you love Atari vector games and haven't read Jed Margolin's primer on how they did it, this is a great technical read:

  The Secret Life of Vector Generators: http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm

  And it's companion piece, the Secret Life of XY Monitors: http://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm

• by dmbaggett on 10/26/18, 9:36 PM

  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.)

• by bitwize on 10/26/18, 7:32 PM

  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.

• by ilamont on 10/26/18, 7:56 PM

  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.

• by blt on 10/26/18, 10:57 PM

  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.

• by evo_9 on 10/26/18, 9:22 PM

  Stuff like this always reminds me of this amazing vector-based home gaming machine from the 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex

• by tabtab on 10/26/18, 11:36 PM

  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.

• by corysama on 10/26/18, 7:53 PM

  If you like this, you might appreciate https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/

• by shove on 10/26/18, 10:50 PM

  We had one at Quarter Horse here in Durham until very recently. Really wanted to keep it in the lineup but it didn’t get enough plays :(

• by Domark on 10/27/18, 1:04 AM

  When I was a kid, my parents would drop my off at a daycare called Kids Time Out.

  This was the early 80s and they had a cocktail version of Asteroids. I mastered it! I could play it all day!

  One of my favorites to this day, along with Gauntlet, STUN Runner and VR Racing/Daytona USA.

• by tragomaskhalos on 10/26/18, 9:05 PM

  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)

• by mcshicks on 10/26/18, 9:42 PM

  So are you gonna play ships or rocks?