Asteroids (rev 4)

Released by Atari in November 1979, Asteroids is a single-screen arcade shooter built around a stark black-and-white vector display. Atari developed and published the game, placing a small triangular spacecraft in an asteroid field rather than giving it a scrolling map or a fixed route. The result is a continuous contest for survival and score in which the player clears one wave only to face another.

The cabinet uses dedicated buttons for rotate left, rotate right, thrust, fire, and hyperspace. Turning changes the ship’s facing, while thrust accelerates it in that direction; releasing thrust leaves the ship drifting under inertia, so steering is as much about planning momentum as pointing at a target. The playfield wraps on both axes, allowing ships, rocks, saucers, and shots to pass off one edge and return from the opposite side.

Each wave begins with large asteroids. A shot breaks a large rock into medium pieces, then medium pieces into faster small ones; a wave ends only after every fragment has been destroyed. The escalating speed of the smaller debris makes the most valuable targets increasingly hazardous, while the player must also avoid collisions and manage the ship’s limited forward-firing shots.

Scoring rewards that danger: large asteroids are worth 20 points, medium asteroids 50, and small asteroids 100. The larger flying saucer is worth 200 points and the smaller saucer 1,000. Operators can set a game to begin with either three or four ships, and the standard game awards an additional ship at 10,000 points, making high-score play a balance between collecting points and preserving the next life.

Flying saucers periodically enter the field as mobile threats. The large saucer fires less accurately, whereas the small saucer is the more dangerous target because its fire is directed at the player’s ship. Hyperspace can abruptly relocate the ship to a random position, offering an escape from an impossible collision course but risking rematerialization into danger.

This entry represents the Atari rev 4 arcade program set, not a new sequel or conversion. MAME uses the parent set name asteroid for this revision and identifies its program ROMs as 035145-04E and 035144-04E, with rev 2 and rev 1 preserved as separate sets. Atari’s documented update for the 04E ROMs altered small-saucer behavior: it fires immediately toward the player on entering the screen, and its missiles wrap around the playfield; earlier programming delayed the first shot and did not give those missiles wraparound travel.

The revision context matters because the basic controls, vector presentation, asteroid waves, and scoring remain the familiar 1979 Asteroids experience, while the small-saucer change specifically tightens late-game pressure. It is therefore best understood as a later Atari field revision of the original arcade game, retaining the original’s design while applying a targeted gameplay adjustment intended to counter exceptionally high-scoring play.