Meteor

Meteor is a clone of Asteroids released by Hoei International, one of the many answers to a game that made so much money in arcades at the turn of the eighties that nearly everyone tried to copy it. In play it barely differs from the original: a small triangular ship sits in the middle of a black screen while lumps of rock drift slowly around it, waiting to be shot apart.

The physics is the point. The ship rotates left and right and the engine pushes it forward, but momentum never goes away. Accelerate and you keep travelling that way long after you let go, and stopping means turning around and thrusting against your own drift. Players who never learn that shoot across the screen and hit the first rock in the way. The game is really teaching you to fly, not to aim.

Shooting is the other half of the problem. A hit does not remove a rock, it splits it into two smaller ones, those split again, and the smallest fragments are the fastest. The screen is therefore busier in the middle of a round than at the start, and you constantly have to judge what to shoot so that you do not close off the last piece of open space yourself. A flying saucer turns up now and then, and unlike the rocks it aims at you.

Today this is a historical entry rather than a discovery, because everyone knows the original and this version adds nothing of its own. What is striking is how well the idea survives: the rules take two sentences, they cannot be mastered in five minutes, a round is short and there is never a reason not to start another one.

On oldgame.cz it runs straight in the browser, with nothing to install.