Asteroids!

Ah yes, many of us have spent countless hours and way too much of our grass cutting money on this quarters eater! Does this game still give you nightmares like it does for me? In fact, when I went back to play it the other day for research my hands were clammy, my head was spinning and I still could not play this game! Ugh, it is so dang hard. That simple yet effective pulse-pounding music those big asteroids heading straight for me and my mind racing knowing the minute I put my spacecraft into motion I'm done for! God, I hate this game and yet I still can not master this game. Yet it calls to me... play me Bobby....play meeeeeee....

*Sigh*

But I do remember how much fun it was to head up to the local pizza joint (Happy Joe's Pizza more on that in a few days) to eat and play video games with the neighborhood boys. Man, the late 70's were so cool minus the clothes of course. Between this game and space invaders, we thought it could never get any better. Arcades did help us through those long Illinois winters until Atari came out and we could play at home.

On November 13, 1982, 15-year-old Scott Safran of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, set a world record of 41,336,440 points on the arcade game Asteroids, beating the 40,101,910 point score set by Leo Daniels of Carolina Beach on February 6, 1982. Dang that is a ton of points I was lucky to get 5,000 the other day when I played. Then a few years ago on  April 6, 2010, John McAllister broke Safran's record with a high score of 41,338,740 in a 58-hour Internet Livestream. 58 hours what the heck the guy is nuts!! 

You know what else is nuts? In 2009, Universal Studios obtained the rights to adapt Asteroids into a film, with Matthew Lopez as the scriptwriter and Lorenzo di Bonaventura as the producer. I think with Battleship, based on the Hasbro board game was such a dud they must have scrapped this one!

So what was your favorite arcade game? Were you any good at Asteroids? I know I was not and that's ok I still had fun playing and that was all that mattered. Let me know in the comments below and remember this is only day one of this monster look back into my life growing up in the 70's and 80's we have 25 more post's to go!

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