DRAFT — awaiting Adam's lock

What Asteroids invented

In 1979 Atari took Spacewar!'s physics — the momentum, the wraparound, even the panic button — and subtracted the other player. What's left is you, inertia, and a sky that multiplies: shoot a rock and it becomes two rocks, shoot those and they become four more, faster. Asteroids is the first great game about making your own problems worse. Clearing the screen and crowding it are the same act, and the game simply watches you decide how fast to dig.

The wrap is the whole geometry. There are no walls and no corners — leave the top and you arrive at the bottom, and everything hunting you can do the same. You are never cornered and never safe, which turns out to be the same feeling.

Four shots

Your gun holds four shots in the air, no more, and each flies for just over a second. That one ceiling is the game's whole marksmanship curriculum: spraying empties your sky-magazine exactly when the fragments come for you, so the game quietly teaches you to fly close and place shots — the point-blank drill, riskier and better, invented by a limit.

The drag

Spacewar!'s ship coasted forever; this one is given a single mercy — ease off the burn and the ship slowly, slowly forgives your momentum. It was 1979's one concession to control, and it's smaller than you want it to be. Momentum still carries you into rocks you swore you'd missed. Drive with the nose, not the gas.

The saucer and the seam

Two temperaments visit. The big saucer wanders in early and shoots at the sky — two hundred points of noise. The small one hunts: it aims at you, it comes more often as your score climbs, and past 35,000 its aim tightens. But this production reproduces the November 1979 machine, and that machine had a blind spot: your shots wrap across the screen edge and the saucer's don't — its missiles die at the seam it can't see across. Players found that seam within weeks and built a whole economy on it. The later ROM taught the saucer to shoot across the edge; this rebuild preserves the sky as it first shipped, blind spot and all — the most consequential accident in this building.

The panic handle

Hyperspace returns from Exhibit 00, and the house has changed the odds. Spacewar! punished each successive jump a little more; this machine's gamble is flat — every jump rolls the same dice, and by the machine's own arithmetic the dice are crueler over an empty sky than a crowded one. Panic early, not often.

The heartbeat

Under everything, two low tones alternate — thump, thump — and as the wave wears on they quicken. Nothing in the rules speeds up with them. Only you do. It is the cheapest difficulty mechanism ever shipped and it works on the oldest hardware in the room: yours.

The score that broke its own scoreboard

Exhibit 03's machine invented the high score; this one weaponized it. The small saucer pays 990 — the machine's own odd arithmetic, kept here to the point. The display holds five digits and quietly starts over at 100,000, because nobody at Atari believed anyone would get there. Within a year, players were rolling it before lunch. The ledger on this cabinet remembers what the display forgets.

This exhibit is an original reconstruction of the mechanic, not the original game.