Description
Your space craft is dangerously situated among fast moving asteroids in an asteroid belt that can destroy your ship on contact. Armed with a front mounted weapon and the ability to hyperspace, you fly through the debris, destroying each rock one piece at a time. Alien saucers visit the playfield from time to time with an eye towards destroying your ship!

Cabinet Information
The first Asteroids cabinets used a different coin-door. The quarters were placed through one of two round openings (large enough for the quarter to fit through). The quarter is placed flat against a wall just inside the opening and released. The quarter drops down for a credit. The display showing the cost of a credit is labeled between the two coin openings. The lettering describing the game play is also in yellow (instead of white) on the monitor overlay. The picture of the Asteroids cabinet at the top of this page is one of these first machines.

Cheats, Tricks and Bugs
The original version of the game had a feature that allowed the player to hide their ship in the score field indefinitely without being hit by flying asteroids.

Game Play
The most famous play tactic for Asteroids is the "hunting" strategy. The player destroys all asteroids except for one that almost clears the playfield and makes it relatively safe. This allows the player to hunt for alien saucers without worrying about being smashed by a lot of flying debris.

Miscellaneous
BOOTLEG: Asterock
Play a JAVA emulated version of the game by visiting http://web.utanet.at/nkehrer/JAsteroids.html

Technical
The Wells-Gardner 19V2000 black and white vector monitor is a direct plug-in replacement monitor for an Asteroids machine. The pinout is almost identical to Asteroids Deluxe.

Trivia
After its release in the US, many arcade operators had to make larger coin boxes for the games so they could hold all of the quarters that these machines collected.