"Asteroids," says Mary Takatsuno, an Atari marketing analyst, "is the only game that ever stopped production lines in our plant. At break time, the entire assembly line would run over to play the machines that were ready to be shipped out. With other games, the guys would just assemble them and box them up, and that was that. But with Asteroids, nobody wanted to work."

Work is a word used very loosely at Atari, When I entered one of the fourteen buildings in Atari's still-growing complex, the receptionist was playing Missile Command, a relatively new game on display in the lobby. Each time her phone rang she ran back to her desk, glancing anxiously over her shoulder as the cities and missile bases she had been defending were incinerated by enemy attackers. Most of the Atari employees I saw projected an aura of almost delirious bliss. They didn't seem to think of themselves as working. This isn't a company, I said to myself, it's a candy factory.

All video games share a common ancestor—Pong. Pong is the great-granddaddy of them all, which begat, among other games. Avalanche, which begat, according to some authorities, Space Invaders, which begat, indirectly, Asteroids. Asteroids' direct ancestor was a game you've never heard of, unless you happen to work at Atari. The game was called Cosmos, and it never got any further

than the early-prototype stage in one of the labs on the ground floor of the engineering building.

"Cosmos was a two-player shoot-'em-up game played on a field consisting of a few planets and some asteroids, " said Lyie V. Rains, now vice-president of engineering at Atari, in whose office I had been deposited. "The asteroids didn't move. But while you were flying around trying to destroy the other player's ship, you could shoot at them if you wanted to. That was the most interesting part of Cosmos, unfortunately. The game died a slow, agonizing death." A year and a half after the funeral, Cos-

Two weeks later, Ed Logg, a programmer, had a working prototype that looked very, very good. Word started to get around. People would drop by Logg's lab just to say hi and then would refuse to leave. It got to the point where Logg was spending a lot of his time shooing grown men back into their offices. He finally had to build two prototypes, one for him to work on and another for his colleagues to play. "At first we called it Champagne Wars, " Rains continued, "because the asteroids looked sort of like the bubbles on Lawrence Welk."

Lyie Rains is twenty-nine years old. He came to Atari seven years ago, immediately after graduating from Berkeley. He figured he'd work a year or two and then go earn another degree. At Berkeley he had majored in electrical engineering, with a specialization in automatic controls—"controlled feedback systems, robot technologies, process controllers, controlling motors"—heavy stuff. Now he's hooked on games, at least for the time being.

"When Asteroids was in the labs," Rains told me, "there were nights when I would stay here until one or two in the morning, just playing the game. I was addicted. " I asked him if he still played. "No, not really, " he said. "What you've got to realize is that by the time these games

reach the market, we've been playing them, sometimes constantly, for six or seven months. "

Later I was able to spend a couple of hours in Atari's game room, an arcadelike space purported to contain one each of every game the company has ever made. Not just a candy factory but a candy store, and everything in it free. My mind slowly boggled. I played Video Pinball and a couple of driving games, then abandoned my attempt at ecumenicism and devoted a good ninety minutes to Asteroids. It's eerie playing games without paying for

Ed Logg, the man who put Asteroids on the monitor (and who dreamed up most of the game's complexities), is a thirty-two-year-old computer programmer who looks exactly like a thirty-two-year-old computer programmer. When I spoke with him he was wearing a light-green shirt, dark-green pants, and a pair of gray Hush Puppies, a brand of footwear that ought to be awarded a Nobel prize for indirect contribution to science. With Logg was Howard Delman, a twenty-eight-year-old design engineer who looks more like a rock star than like the supervisor of the electrical engineers, which is what he is. Delman designed the printed-circuit board in which Logg's Asteroids program resides. He also created the game's distinctive sounds (of which there are eleven).

"Friends call me up all the time, " Delman said, "and ask, 'What's the secret of Asteroids?' I say, 'Just play it a lot. That's the only secret. It takes a lot of practice.' "

I was delighted to hear this, since my wife had recently wondered aloud whether I wasn't spending too much time and money on Asteroids. Now I'd be able to tell her, Sorry, honey, the guys who invented the thing told me to practice.

When Asteroids was in development, Logg occasionally eliminated some of the game's randomness, just for fun. Once he installed a secret "kill switch" that would destroy the spaceship of anyone he happened to be playing with. Another time he altered the program so that the high-score table would refuse to display the initials of one of his colleagues. (The engineers like to plot practical jokes on one another: they once considered implanting electromagnetic devices in the ears of their boss's tropical fish, hoping to make the fish turn upside down every time he answered his phone.)

You might think that these men who literally hold the game's secrets in their hands would be among the hottest Asteroids players in the world. But this is not the case. The record score in the engineering building when Asteroids was introduced (at which point the game, in more or less its final form, had been in existence for half a year) was around 90,000. This is a very respectable score by any accounting. But within only a few months, people at Atari began to hear