Atari developed the 1979 arcade game Asteroids.
The game was designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg at Atari and released in arcades in November 1979. Players pilot a small spacecraft, rotate and thrust through an empty field, and fire at drifting asteroids and hostile flying saucers.
Asteroids used vector graphics rather than the raster imagery common in many arcade games of the period. Its wraparound playfield allowed objects to leave one edge of the screen and reappear at the opposite edge, creating a continuous arena.
Asteroids became one of Atari’s most successful arcade games and helped establish the company’s reputation beyond its earlier Pong success. It is sometimes confused with Spacewar!, a much earlier computer game that influenced the space-combat genre but was not an Atari arcade release.