Astrosmash is a sci-fi game for the Intellivision, released in 1981. It's a popular 80's hit.
Gameplay[]
The player controls a rover on the surface of a planet at the game's start, and before long, object start falling from the sky. At first just Asteroids fall, but before long, sattelites start falling too. Later in the game a strange homing star-like projectile falls. And last but certainly not least, if the player holds on long enough, an alien UFO appears and fires blasts at the rover. The player must use the automatic weapon on the rover to keep from getting obliterated. Larger asteroids when shot, split into smaller versions of themselves, which the player must blast, or avoid. Every asteroid that gets past the player to the ground deducts points from the counter.
Development[]
The game was originally suposed to be a version of Atari's Asteroids called Meteor!, but had to be changed because of a legal issue. The programer then decided to have the game centered on a rover, and have the objects fall. The flying saucer was also changed to an enemy from another Intellivision game, Space Armada. However the original gameplay for Astrosmash was kept, for a later Intellivision game, and what's considered by fans to be a sequel, Space Hawk. The game had a scoring bug, where after 999,999,999 random ASCII icons would appear. But John Sohl managed to translate the icons into regular scores on later copies.
Trivia[]
- Astrosmash, became the most popular game on the Intellivision.
- Atari tried to build a clone of Astrosmash for their own consoles called Astro-Bash, which was not nearly as popular.