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Comment by jaredsohn | Hacker News Reader

The problem with calling this Asteroids is that there are no asteroids. :)

This reminds me more of an old DOS shareware game called Spacewar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY5qHe2VadA), which was also multi-player although that game also allowed turning on gravity and warping (I see a comment mentioning warping in this game but I don't see it in the command list.)

This was one of my (and my friends') favorite small games back around 1990.

Edit: It was a DOS game when I played it. It is good to feel like a young person when talking about a game that I played 22 years ago.

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Uh... Spacewar was an old PDP-1 game. It predates DOS by a little bit. And the microprocessor. And DRAM. And raster displays (the output was two analog channels fed to a raw CRT). It was essentially everyone's favorite computer game (everyone who knew what a computer game was) back around 1962.

And Spacewar even introduced the concept of "hyperspace" (don't let Atari ever tell you different)

Only partially related, but there was a fantastic game called Star Control 2 once upon a time. The main single player game was a big long quest, but it also had a 'Melee' mode where you and a friend could go up against each other in Asteroids-style space combat- putting different types of ships with different weapons against each other. So much fun was had.

Good news is that it's been ported to modern systems: http://sc2.sourceforge.net/

There was another one called Subspace (now Continuum) http://www.getcontinuum.com/. I loved the early days of that game. 1997-ish.

Oh man, I remember finding the client on a CD around '97. I had no internet, but I roamed those corridors alone for hours... Those were the days.

I thought you meant the 1987-ish mac game called Continuum.

http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/various/continuum/index.h...

http://www.ski-epic.com/continuum_downloads/index.html

I spent hours flying round in that thing, one of the most perfect online competitive experiences I've had in gaming so far.

indeed. basically: Asteroids = Space War + asteroids + single-player + occasional alien ship

i've recreated both games a few times over the years, as hobby prototypes. fun games, simple mechanics. flying & shooting + imagination FTW.

I came to say this exact thing. Please make this one into an MMO next.

Check out http://www.mmospacewar.com/. I made a few changes to mmoasteroids.com to make it behave more like the DOS version of Spacewar. Unfortunately, Firebase isn't available for another 1 day 18 hours 18 minutes and 10 seconds yet (http://www.firebase.com), so anyone who plays this will share the world and scoreboard with MMO Asteroids for now. (Hopefully this doesn't present a problem to the guy who created MMOAsteroids; there are already plenty of cheaters on there anyway.)

New features: warp (press 'z') and instead of instant death you have an energy which gets depleted by using thrust, colliding with other ships/bullets, and warping.

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