The object of the game is equally unadorned: to shoot at and destroy progressively more challenging onslaughts of space rubble and computer-directed flying saucers. The player's weapon in this confrontation is a tiny missile-firing spaceship represented by a triangular blip on the screen, which the player controls by manipulating five white buttons (Rotate Left, Rotate Right, Thrust, Fire, and Hyper Space). The asteroids he shoots at are nothing more than jagged little two-dimensional outlines, the largest about an inch in diameter, that drift across the dark-gray screen. Large asteroids are worth 20 points, mediums are worth 50, and smalls are worth 100. The player starts out with a fleet of three or four ships (depending on the machine), which he operates one at a time. His game lasts until his final ship has either collided with an asteroid or lost a shoot-out with an enemy saucer. For every 10,000 points he earns, he wins an extra ship. And that, more or less, is all there is to it.

So why the crowds?

"Asteroids is a drug," says Doug Mcintyre, an international marketing manager at Time Inc. "When you play the game, the rest of the world ceases to exist. You can't even hear what's going on around you. People could be breaking chairs over each other's heads and you wouldn't notice. "

Asteroids is such a seductive escape that some men feel guilty about giving in to it. "When I see people I know in here," says a fifty-four-year-old fast-food entrepreneur, "we greet each other as though we'd met in a bordello. "

Asteroids isn't an intellectual game like chess. It has more in common with fast-paced physical sports like squash and handball, games that demand precisely honed reflexes and an acute spatial sense.

"Eventually you get to the point where you're not even concentrating anymore," says John Fisher, a production manager at Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company. "You reach some kind of state of being at one with the machine. Sometimes when I walk out of here it's almost like I'm high. Not falling-down drunk or anything, but I'll be in just a little bit of a daze, maybe an inch or so off the ground."

Fisher's enthusiasm may be somewhat suspect: his company, Warner Amex, is related by marriage to the manufacturer of Asteroids. But it makes a certain amount of sense that a man who plays a lot of Asteroids would gravitate in his career toward the source of his obsession. And there is no denying that Fisher plays a lot of Asteroids. "I played yesterday at lunchtime," he says, "and after work, and then again this morning, and then today at lunchtime." Don't worry that he doesn't have anything to do when he finally gets home: he and his wife have a pinball table in their kitchen. In fact, it was by way of pinball that Fisher came to Asteroids in the first place. "I've played pinball ever since I was a little boy, and I still play all the time. But pinball's gone way down in the last few years. I don't like the new electronic tables, and I don't like paying fifty cents for three balls. Now I play video games, too, and Asteroids is the best by far. "

I peer over Fisher's shoulder while he plays a game. He maneuvers his spaceship behind a drifting asteroid and begins to shoot, wiggling the nose of his ship a little to spray the bullets over a wider area. His target splits with a satisfying rumble, and then the fragments detonate as he strafes them with more bullets. He rockets across the screen, dodging boulders as he goes, and begins to shoot again.

"Playing Asteroids is a little like directing a television show, " Fisher has told me. "When you direct a show, you are in charge of what is generally a state of controlled chaos. You have to think fast. There's a level of excitement that builds and builds.

By now, the machine is thumping at an angina-inducing tempo, a nearly hypnotic rhythm reminiscent of the chilling heart-beat that pulsed through the soundtrack of Jaws. On his second turn, Fisher passes the -10,000 -point mark and wrings an orgasmic peal of surrender from the machine, along with an extra turn. By the time he has worked his way through his last ship, he has earned a score of just over 26,000 points. This is one of the ten highest on the machine, so he is allowed to type in his initials, using the Left, Right, and Hyper Space buttons, and see them displayed beside his tally on the screen.

"I wrenched my back the other day," Fisher says, "and I've been taking codeine pills to kill the pain. But when I play Asteroids, I don't even notice that it hurts."

I know what he means. For the last four months I've been an Asteroids addict myself. Being addicted to a video game isn't so disruptive as being addicted to, say, heroin, but my Asteroids dependence has brought about definite changes in my lifestyle. I can't pass a bar anymore without peering into the doorway and searching the darkness for the faint gray glow of an Asteroids monitor. Sometimes I'm stricken with cravings so strong I'm unable to control them. Not long ago my wife and I, along with four or five friends stepped into an ice cream parlor in Green wich Village for a late dessert. Just inside the door was an Asteroids machine. While the others ordered sundaes, I emptied my pockets into the game. When I finally tore myself away, I was alone.

Major obsessions often involve a pilgrimage of one sort or another. In my case this meant a journey to Sunnyvale, California, down near the southern end of San Francisco Bay. Sunnyvale is one of several thriving outposts in "Silicon Gulch, " other wise known as the Santa Clara Valley, the cradle of the microprocessor industry. It is also the home of Atari Inc., the manufacturer of Asteroids. I wanted to meet the game's inventors and observe them in their natural environment. Among other things, I wanted to see what effect their line of work had had on their general outlook. If Asteroids was taking over the lives of men in business, what was it doing to the men whose business was Asteroids?

Atari has grown phenomenally in the eight years it has been in existence. The company was founded on a shoestring in 1972 by a twenty-nine-year-old computer engineer named Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell had invented a game combining a television screen, 'a few hand controls, and 3 relatively simple printed-circuit board, and he hoped that someone else would be interested in building it. He approached