Asteroids (video game)

Asteroids is an arcade game designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg and released by Atari in November 1979. The player steers a small triangular ship through a field of drifting rocks, shooting them into smaller and faster pieces while avoiding collisions and the fire of passing flying saucers. It was drawn on a vector monitor, which traces bright lines directly instead of filling a grid of pixels, and the screen wraps around: a ship or rock that leaves one edge reappears at the opposite one.^[1]

The first design of Moleculoids, a game by Molecular Reality Corporation, was a version of Asteroids with proteins in place of rocks. The game that shipped under the name is a dungeon crawler.

The controls are five buttons: rotate left, rotate right, thrust, fire and hyperspace. The ship keeps drifting after the thrust is released, as it would in space, so turning to shoot and stopping are separate problems. A large asteroid hit by a shot splits into two medium ones, and a medium one into two small ones, which are destroyed outright; the game allows no more than 26 rocks on screen at once. Hyperspace removes the ship and puts it back at a random place, which may be inside a rock.^[1]

Two kinds of saucer cross the screen. The large one fires at random. The small one aims, and aims better as the player's score rises; above 40,000 points it is the only kind that appears.^[1]

The game grew out of an unfinished Atari project called Cosmos, originally Planet Grab, which had a giant asteroid that could not be destroyed. Rains asked: "why don't we have a game where you shoot the rocks and blow them up?" Logg, who programmed it, modeled the ship's controls and physics on Spacewar!, the 1962 game for the PDP-1 computer, and the play drew on Computer Space and Space Invaders.^[1]

Players soon found a way to play indefinitely. A saucer can only aim at a ship that is on the screen, so a player who left one or two slow rocks alive could wait near an edge and shoot saucers across the boundary for points. This was called lurking. Arcade operators, whose takings depended on games ending, complained, and Atari issued a revised program chip.^[1] Scott Safran's score of 41,336,440, set on November 13, 1982, stood until John McAllister beat it on April 5, 2010, after a session of 58 hours streamed online.

Atari built 47,840 upright cabinets and 8,725 cocktail-table cabinets. The Atari 2600 version of 1981 did not fit in the console's usual 4 kilobytes, and it became the first cartridge for the console to switch between banks of memory, doubling its capacity to 8 kilobytes.^[1]

On the menu of the company's MoleculArcade, the card for Moleculoids still describes the first design: "a molecular take on the classic Asteroids", in which "Proteins split by molecular weight" and players should "Watch for binding partners that merge into super-complexes!"^[2] That version survives in a backup folder of the game's files. Its ship had three lives and its rocks were protein structures from the Protein Data Bank. A shot split a large protein into two medium fragments, as in Atari's game, and a medium one into three small ones, one more than Atari allowed. A saucer appeared every 18 to 30 seconds and fired every 1.5 seconds.^[3]

Hyperspace became a warp guarded by a quiz. The player had ten seconds to say which protein on screen had a molecular weight of approximately so many kilodaltons, and a right answer moved the ship to a random point near the center. A wrong answer cost a life.^[3] In Asteroids the risk of hyperspace is chance; in the protein version it was biochemistry.

The game behind the card is a top-down dungeon crawler whose monsters are rendered from the same structures. Ludicious reviewed it in July 2026 under the headline "Moleculoids Review: An Asteroids Game That Turned Into a Dungeon", scored it 7 out of 10, and gave it 2 for truth in advertising.^[4]

• Moleculoid items
• List of Molecular Reality Corporation games