Pierre Menard's The Asteroids
August 5, 2018 8:30 PM   Subscribe

Pierre Menard's The Asteroids
Perhaps the most significant game of our time

Or, you know, just Asteroids. I wanted to make a game, and I've read that a good place to start if you've never done that before is to rebuild a classic game. While I was working on it, I noticed some similarities between remaking a game and the classic Borges story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

Like Menard, I didn't want to merely copy or emulate, and I wrote it using relatively modern tools, but at the same time, the closer I could get to the 1979 game, the better. When my game does something like pause before letting the aliens shoot, that is, in a sense, an artistic choice I made in order to better match the gameplay of the original, whereas when the original might have done it due to hardware limitations, or a bug (in one case that I am aware of.) Also, like Menard's Quixote, my game is a failure in the sense that it isn't exactly Asteroids.

On the other hand, I learned a lot and made a working game, and it has cool explosions if you are into that sort of doodled hand-drawn look, so that's a huge success.
Role: Programmer
posted by surlyben (2 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite

Lovely! The only suggestion I have would be the piece of paper being wadded into a ball when you're out of lives. ;D
posted by Celsius1414 at 8:35 PM on August 5, 2018


Yes! I think that's a good idea. The reasons I haven't already done it are that I don't like unskippable animations, and I doubt my ability to make the animation (also I want to limit the things I put in that aren't asteroids). But if I kept it very short and it worked it would help smooth out the background transitions, I think.
posted by surlyben at 10:14 AM on August 6, 2018 [1 favorite]


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