In 1962 Steve Russell creates Space War on the PDP-1 computer. It was one of the world's earliest video games and was years ahead of it's time. In 1978 Cinematronics releases Space Wars in the arcade It was based on Steve Russell's game. Space Wars used Larry Rosenthal's vector graphics technology. Vector graphics was a huge innovation in game graphics. It would allow for images drawn to have sharp edges, and crisp shapes. It would also allow elaborate line art and stark contrast. Other game designers had been using raster-scan which would only draw crude shapes, for instance if you wanted to show a car it would just look like a rectangle.



PDP-1 computer

But early vector graphics could not generate colours.So game companies would place coloured plastic overlays on the top of the game screen to create an illusion of colour. In 1980 an engineer at Atari named Howie Delman creates a more powerful vector graphic generator for coin op games. The first game to use this new technology was called 'lunar lander'. In that game players had to dock a lunar lander on the moon using limited fuel. The game was incredibly innovative as it had realistic simulations of the physics of lunar gravity. 'Lunar Lander' was not particularly successful but the technologly behind it would later be used in Atari's game 'Asteriods'.

Lyle Rains, vice president of Atari's coin operated games division had an idea for a game in which players cleared an area of space by shooting asteriods whilst flying around in a small ship. Rains also came up with the idea that the asteroids should get smaller every time you shoot them with your ship. Ed Logg the programmer behind 'Super Breakout' was assigned the task of creating Asteroids. Ed Logg decided to make Asteroids use vector graphics because at that time it's high resolution was 1024x768. At that resolution you would be able to make out the tiny ship perfectly. Logg believed that at normal resolution the game would look ugly.


Asteroids arcade gameplay screenshot

In just one week Logg had a preliminary version of Asteroids made on his workstation. In just six weeks the game was nearly finished.The inspiration for it's control scheme came from the original Space War game from 1962. Asteroids released in November 1979. In the game there was a button that when pressed would jump the player into hyper space making them appear on a randomly selected spot on the screen. This was another idea that was also taken from the original Space War game.

 After Asteroids release it became so successful it toppled the hottest game of the time: Space Invader. 70,000 cabinets of Asteroids where sold worldwide. The game was so in demand that some of the game cabinets came with extra large coin boxes. Asteroids was so successfull in fact that it's revenue combined with the sales of the VCS home consoles meant that Atari accounted for one third of the income from it's parent company: Warner Communications. What set Asteroids apart from games like Space Invaders was it's realism. It had realistic physics, complete with inertia and momentum. The game looked and played better than anything on the market. This was the start of the golden age for video games.