Atari was a corporation that was โbornโ in 1972. The first arcade game released by this fledgling company was Pong. After that, Atari released games such as Breakout, Sprint (both 2 and 4), Night Driver, and Firetruck to name a few. In 1977, Cinematronics released a game called Space Wars that was created by Larry Rosenthal. Atari realized that this would be the next genre in a logical progression, so Howard Delman was tasked with creating a vector generator for Atari. In 1979, Howard Delmanโs vector generator was used in Lunar Lander. In 1978, Space Invaders took the world by storm. With Space Invaders, a whole slew of space-type games entered the arcade.
Lyle Rains proposed a new game to Ed Logg which involved shooting asteroids. Ed Logg modified the idea to include multiple sizes of asteroids and to use the vector generator instead of the standard raster scan monitor. Hence, the beginning of Asteroids was as a game which would have the player in the middle of an asteroid field and their purpose would be to destroy said asteroids. In addition, asteroids would not be the only hazard. Alien ships would also be shooting at you. This would basically force the player to not only have to deal with the asteroids coming at them, but also to contend with saucers shooting at them. The game also featured some relatively new things such as being able to put up your initials for a high score and a wrap-around screen.
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