Asteroids became a huge hit and was one of the titles that helped usher in the so-called golden age of arcade videogames. The momentum continued with hit after hit after hit: Battlezone, Missile Command, Centipede, Tempest, Crystal Castles. Outside of the arcades, the new 400 and 800 computers had little competition in the home market and saw sales double year on year – at least until 1983 when the newly launched Commodore 64 weighed in. Elsewhere, the Atari VCS suddenly hit high gear, having ticked along for several years. The catalyst was the conversion of Space Invaders which quadrupled sales of the hardware and helped the VCS become the biggest-selling console of its generation. Atari had previously converted some of its arcade hits to the VCS, but the success of Space Invaders saw it double down with versions of Asteroids, Missile Command, Warlords and Centipede all arriving and becoming hugely popular.
Despite Atari’s success, it wasn’t always easy converting the latest coin-op hits to the primitive VCS hardware. Just ask Howard Scott Warshaw. On joining Atari in 1981 he was tasked with bringing Cinematronics’ to the VCS. “I explained to my manager that a vector graphics game involving concentric rotating circles would not translate well,” he says. “I presented him with an alternative screen layout and gameplay that I believed was much better adapted to the VCS.” Rather than telling this new-start to collect his things, Howard’s manager accepted his analysis and he began working on the new design. and it would become Atari’s biggest-selling original VCS game.
