After only two years of programming games, Logg had already witnessed patterns within Atari that hinted at a game’s impending success. “I could tell when late in the project people would come in and bug you: ‘Can I play the game now? Can I play the game now?’ Or you’d leave for the night, come back and the hi-score table would be full.” While all were good indicators, accolades from fellow engineers are rarely good predictors of market performance. The game needed real-world testing, which it got in Sacramento, California. Logg describes the first time he saw a normal person play his game, “First guy just walked up to the game, put a quarter in and died instantly. It must have been a 15-second game. And he turned around and put another quarter in. And for me that was like, ‘Okay, I know now that this game is okay.’ Usually when people die after 15 seconds they say, ‘Oh shit, the game’s too hard,’ and walk away. But in this case, it was clear to me that the player said, ‘I screwed up, I can do better.’ And that’s what you want to see in a game.”

“The initial game design was set up so that as soon as the saucer came in he would take a shot,” says Logg. “And most people would hear the saucer sound first, and try to locate him. By this time of course the saucer has already taken a shot and if you weren’t paying attention or unlucky he could nail you before you even had a chance to do anything. So it was felt, and I agreed, that the saucer had to wait a little while before he took a shot at you. This opened the doors to the whole lurking strategy.” Logg wasn’t too concerned, since he tried to master lurking and was unsuccessful, so he felt nobody could do it. But that ‘delay before firing’ did result in the development of lurking, and Logg finally figured out how to do it himself.
 


Players used lurking to impress their friends. Operators started to complain about lost revenue. In response, Logg and his team created a new ‘lurk-limiting’ EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Module) to replace the old one. Asteroids fans soon realised that some machines were harder than others. If they came upon a machine with the new lurking-disabled EPROM, they’d move on to another machine. Experts wanted to lurk and show off. Others wanted to imitate the masters and learn how to lurk. No one knows for sure, but lurking may have been the factor that kept the game in play for such a long time.

Get good enough at Asteroids and the game slows down; Logg had no idea that players were going to cap his resources. It’s a programming error that Logg admits to, “I should have limited the number of the player spaceships to ten or something. But I drew so many across the top of the screen and I kept drawing them off the edge of the screen that the game actually slowed down.” Build 50 to 100 lives and the game will begin to crawl.
 
Collect more than 250 lives and you may lose your game. It’s the fault of the machine’s watchdog circuit. To stay operational, coin-operated arcade units need a periodic response from the program. The watchdog circuit tells the machine that the game is still working. If too much time passes and the program doesn’t receive a response,  the watchdog circuit will think the game’s dead and it will reboot.


   
Logg definitely yearns for the earlier days of game developing, where he only dealt with one or two people instead of 30 and it only took a few weeks instead of a year and a half to develop a prototype. Asteroids has been a major part of his life. He used to play the game in his sleep. When he mentions it to people, he often gets the response, “Oh, so you’re responsible for all my lost milk money.” Logg, however, doesn’t accept responsibility. That’s not to say he wouldn’t give Asteroids credit for his marriage: in an odd twist, before he ever met his wife, she already owned a coin-op Asteroids in her home.

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in E117.