Interesting stuff about what cosmos ended up creating!!
From Cosmos to Asteroids
Asteroids is a perfect example of success stemming from failure. It's one of the most successful and influential games of all time, and it owes its existence to a proposed tabletop gaming system that never saw the light of day.
Back in the 1970s, the technology world was all a-flutter about holograms, which produced 3D photographic images using lasers. Holographic theory first came along in the '40s, but it wasn't until the invention of the laser in 1960 that true holograms could be created. Scientists spent most of the '60s and early '70s perfecting holographic technology and developing mass-market uses for it, such as printing 3D images on magazine covers. Atari became excited about the possibility of using holograms for videogames, and spent a great deal of time and money in the Disco Decade researching holograms and purchasing hologram-related patents. Finally, by the latter part of the '70s, Atari began developing Cosmos, a two-player tabletop system that used holograms to produce three-dimensional images on the playfield.
The ill-fated Cosmos
Cosmos spent several years in development, partly because the technology to mass-produce the necessary holograms had to be invented before the system could work. Finally, in 1981, Atari announced that Cosmos would soon be ready to ship. Before it hit the market, however, advance reviews griped that the holograms were nothing more than background images, and didn't add anything to the play value of the games. Atari agreed, and decided to put off the release of Cosmos until the holograms could be used more effectively. This never happened, however, and Cosmos faded into obscurity.
Cosmos might have had zero impact on the games industry if it hadn't been for one event. In 1979, Lyle Rains, a chief engineer on the Cosmos project, talked to Programmer Ed Logg about a Cosmos game in the works. The game was a two-player space battle, where spaceships had to avoid or destroy static asteroids as they fought each other. Rains liked the game and thought that if the asteroids moved, it might work as a one-player experience. Logg agreed and set out to create a coin-operated version of such a game. He had the first prototype within two weeks.
Logg's prototype of Asteroids caught on so quickly with his fellow engineers at Atari that he had to build a second prototype just so they could play it. After production got under way, the assembly line would routinely stop just so that the workers could play a few games. Obviously Asteroids was destined for success.
In Asteroids, players control a triangular spaceship that starts off in the center of the screen. A number of big asteroids drift across the playfield. The player must destroy the space-borne rocks while staying out of their paths. Players can freely rotate the ship and apply engine thrust to move it. The ship moves realistically, taking a moment to reach full speed and continuing to move in the same direction even after thrust ceases. When you shoot an asteroid, it breaks into two small pieces that fly off with a random direction and velocity. Destroy those, and they break into two even smaller pieces. Be careless with your firing, and you'll end up with a whole mess of deadly rocks hurtling around. To make things more difficult, two varieties of flying saucers fly through the asteroid field at regular intervals, breaking apart the big rocks while trying to destroy you. All this action is set to a Jaws-like thumping bass line -- still the best sound effect for getting "in the zone" ever conceived for a video game.
Innovations
Asteroids was innovative in many ways. Space Invaders was the first game to keep track of the highest score attained on a machine. Asteroids took this concept further by allowing players to enter their initials for setting one of the top ten High Scores.
It was the first game to track initials, and players lined up to aim for this chance at videogame fandom. Asteroids also featured more complicated controls than most games of the time, with five buttons in total (two to rotate your spacecraft, and three for firing, thrust, and Hyperspace). Finally, although it was not the first game to do so, Asteroids uses a vector graphics monitor to produce sharp, black-and-white linear graphics. The vector graphics fit the futuristic outer space theme very well.
Asteroids rocketed to dominance at the arcades, even managing to unseat Space Invaders as the then-current top moneymaker. According to the KLOV, Asteroids was so successful that arcade operators had to install larger coin boxes to hold all the quarters that players plunked into the machines. Overall, Atari produced 70,000 Asteroids machines -- the largest production run of any vector game in coin-op history. The 50,000th machine produced came in a special "gold" cabinet that today resides in Ed Logg's home.
The Atari 2600 version of Asteroids hit the market in 1981, coincidentally the same year that Cosmos was supposed to be released. It was the first 8K 2600 title, and became one of the most successful home games ever. In the arcades, Asteroids went on to inspire a follow-up in the form of Asteroids Deluxe, an indirect sequel called Space Duel, and an updated game titled Blasteroids, which included bosses and power-ups. Recently, Activision published a 3D version of Asteroids for the PC, Playstation, and Game Boy Color.
Tapping into man's primordial need to smash big rocks into smaller rocks, Asteroids became Atari's biggest hit to that point, raking in tremendous money and establishing the company as the leading coin-op producer for the next several years. Asteroids sits between Space Invaders and Defender on the video game family tree, making it a forefather to every shooter from 1980 onward. Hard to believe all that success stemmed from two guys talking about a game system that was doomed to failure. There was a good idea in there somewhere.
Courtesy of
www.classicgaming.com