Asteroids

He was found unconscious in a stranger's yard after blacking out.

Then, during a filmed attempt to break the asteroid's world record at the same arcade where Lopez became ill, another Portland teen played Asteroids for 28 hours until suffering from severe stomach pain.

Ten days later, the FBI raided several Portland arcades in the area.

The lead-up to the raid involved FBI agents monitoring cabinets for evidence of tampering and recording high scores for possible witnesses.

So, Nate, here's some of them.

Asteroids.

Yeah.

It's a space movie, I guess.

Even things like asteroids, you're like, well, it's a space...

It just seems when you're talking about old coin ops, which I obviously love, is that you're thinking...

How are you using that beyond just going, people have heard the word Pong or Asteroids or Battlezone.

We'll just do a film that's very tangentially connected, but that will help, which seems a bit cynical, to be honest.

Yeah, a lot of those old arcades weren't exactly story heavy, were they? Not really,

Dr. Muto is the final thing he had anything to do with.

Prior to that, he did Super Breakout, Asteroids in 1979, Centipede, Millipede, Gauntlet, Gauntlet 2, Tetris for Atari.

It wasn't his game, but Steel Talons, Gauntlet 4, Wayne Gretzky 3D Hockey, San Francisco Rush, Rush 2, and San Francisco Rush 2049, and then in 2002, Dr. Muto, and then he got out.

Magnum opus.

We'll have to dig in there sometime.

Oh, here it is.

Gold Asteroids cabinet at Atari.

Very rare.

I have a video of myself somewhere of defeating the eight spiders and getting up to 370,000 points or something.

Um, And then the last one was Asteroids.

And this version of Asteroids actually is odd because it does seemingly look a lot like the 2600 version in that all the asteroids are filled in, but the asteroids float in the correct directions.

Right.

The physics are correct in the game.

For the Atari 8-bits, there were versions for other systems.

I think there's a Commodore 64 one that we found.

This is a game that answers the question, what if Asteroids was a raster game and had an end-of-level boss that would scare the entire arcade? That's basically what Sinistar is.

It's basically just a tribute to old vector graphics.

And it starts out as an Asteroids clone, and then it cuts to...

I think it cuts to what's the Tempest and then it was something else.

And then it was an all new first person battle tank style vector graphics game.

By 1981, the game grossed more than $1 billion in quarters.

It overtook both the arcade game Asteroids and the movie Star Wars.

The game was so popular that reportedly in San Francisco, someone was shot because they interrupted a player during a game.

Pac-Man has since been regarded as the best-selling arcade game of all time with upwards of $6 billion in earnings.

The golden age of the arcade, when the games were most profitable, began in 1978 and lasted until 1982.

Top arcade games of the end of the 70s included Atari's Asteroids, Super Breakout, and Missile Command, and the Japanese company Taito's Space Invaders.

Bally Midway entered the arcade business by partnering with the Japanese company Namco, formerly Atari's distributor in Japan, and importing Namco's game, Galaxian.

Now, Namco revolutionized the arcade scene when it introduced the first video game celebrity, Pac-Man.

23rd.

22nd on the list is Missile Command, which is actually very interesting because contemporary reports at the time said that Missile Command was one of the big three games of 1981, alongside Asteroids and Space Invaders, which was, you know, still doing incredible business in 1981, even though it was a 1980 release.

Retrospective reports have often, without citing any sources, have often said that it sold 2.5 million units.

I would've expected with all that information for Missile Command to be a lot higher on this list than 22nd.

It certainly is.

All right, now it is time finally for us to go through our top 10 all-time best-selling games on the VCS released by Atari, possibly only from 1980 forward, not including bundled games, and net sales to retailers, not consumers, to get all of the caveats in one place.

Number 10 on our list is the big game on the VCS in the year 1981, that being Asteroids.

People like shooting rocks.

Loving this concept.

Of course, it was for Asteroids for the Atari 2600.

Oh, yeah.

working on final fantasy legend now yeah i love to hear more people get into retro achievements it's a great way to revisit uh your old your old favorites and maybe finding a new reason to go back to a game you would have dropped or something