Asteroids
Drift, rotate, shoot, and try not to hit the rocks. Made by Doug McInnes.
Left and right arrows to rotate. Up arrow to thrust. Space to fire, shift for hyperspace.
How to play
- Rotate your ship to aim and thrust to move. There is no brake.
- Shoot the large rocks. Each one breaks into smaller, faster pieces.
- Clear every fragment to move to the next wave.
- A collision with any rock costs a life.
Playing it better
- Use short taps of thrust. Momentum carries you across the screen long after you let go.
- Deal with one rock completely before breaking another. Two clouds of fragments at once is how runs end.
- Stay near the middle. The edges wrap around, so a rock you shot away can return behind you.
- When you are surrounded, thrust through the gap rather than trying to shoot your way out.
About Asteroids
Asteroids is the purest expression of inertia in game design. Your ship rotates and thrusts, and nothing ever slows it down, so every input you make is a debt you pay back later when you need to be somewhere else. This browser version by Doug McInnes is a faithful HTML5 canvas rewrite under the MIT licence, and it keeps the vector look and the floaty physics that made the original memorable.
The core tension comes from the way rocks split. Shooting a large asteroid does not remove a threat, it multiplies it into smaller and faster ones. Clearing a screen means accepting that things get busier before they get quieter, and the players who last longest work through one rock at a time instead of firing at everything in sight.
Movement is the real skill. The screen wraps at every edge, so a rock that drifts off the right returns on the left, and so do you. Good players use that deliberately, escaping a crowded area by crossing an edge, and they keep their speed low enough to still change direction when something appears in front of them.
Because it is drawn with simple lines on a canvas, it runs smoothly on almost anything with a browser and loads in under a second. The source is small enough to read in one sitting, which has made it a popular reference for anyone building a first arcade game of their own.
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Common questions
Why does my ship keep drifting?+
There is no friction in space and none in this game. Thrust adds speed and only an opposing thrust removes it.
What does hyperspace do?+
It teleports you to a random spot on the screen. It is an escape from a hopeless position, and it can drop you somewhere worse.
Do the rocks get harder?+
Each wave adds more of them and they arrive faster, so screens get busier the longer you survive.
What licence is it under?+
MIT, with the original copyright notice kept in the folder we serve it from.
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