Atari Asteroids

About

Asteroids is Atari's 1979 arcade game, designed by programmer Ed Logg with director Lyle Rains; it sold more than 70,000 arcade cabinets and is estimated to have earned Atari over $500 million in quarters. This is a Python 3/Pygame recreation of Atari's arcade Asteroids, ported by Francisco Sanchez Arroyo from an earlier project called Pythentic Asteroids by Nick Redshaw. It aims for authentic asteroid shapes, damped ship handling, and other arcade-accurate touches, and is released under the GPL.

Getting started

Run it directly with "python asteroids.py" (or "python3 asteroids.py"). Controls use Z/X or the left/right arrow keys to rotate, N or the up arrow to thrust, B or space to fire, H for hyperspace, P to pause (with O for frame-by-frame advance), F for full screen, and J to toggle an FPS display.

Known issues & limitations

• gameplay: Game slows down when accumulating 50 to 100 lives due to sprite rendering.
• gameplay: Game may crash or reset if more than 250 lives are accumulated due to watchdog circuit timeout.