Description
The game was conceived by Lyle Rains and programmed and designed by Dominic Walsh and Ed Logg. It was implemented on hardware developed by Howard Delman. Asteroids was a hit in the United States and became Atari's best selling game of all time. Atari had been in the process of manufacturing another vector game, Lunar Lander, but demand for Asteroids was so high "that several hundred Asteroids games were shipped in Lunar Lander cabinets." Asteroids was so popular that video arcade operators sometimes had to install larger boxes to hold the number of coins that were spent by players.
Asteroids is also the first game to use Atari's "QuadraScan" vector-refresh system; a full-color version known as "Color-QuadraScan" was later developed for games such as Space Duel and Tempest.
Read more about this topic: Asteroids (video game)
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to- morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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That paragons description and wild fame;
One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)