Remember Asteroids? Now You Get to Destroy the Spaceships.

This takes me right back to my old Atari and Asteroids, except somebody decided to turn the whole thing upside down. Spaceships is basically Asteroids in reverse, where you are not the ship. You control the rocks.

And that got me thinking about just how damn good Asteroids was in the first place. Back in November 1979, Atari had the right people in the right room. Atari executive Lyle Rains came up with the basic idea of a spaceship blasting big space rocks, then Ed Logg took it and turned it into the game we all remember. He added the nasty little twist that made things much harder: shoot the big asteroids and they break apart into smaller, faster pieces. Just when you thought you were clearing the screen, you had even more stuff coming at you.

Then there was Howard Delman, the hardware guy who took the vector technology from Lunar Lander and helped create the Quadrascan hardware that gave Asteroids those sharp, glowing lines. There was something almost magical about seeing those white vectors drawing themselves across a black screen in an arcade. No fancy graphics, no giant characters, just rocks, a spaceship and a whole lot of things trying to kill you. Somehow it worked.

That’s the beauty of Spaceships. It takes that incredibly simple idea and flips your role completely. This freshly released web game from Trey Bastian has you controlling the environment instead of the spaceship. You’re not flying around trying to survive the asteroids. You are the problem.

Click or tap to drop gravity wells, mess with the paths of the floating asteroids and try to smash the AI-controlled spaceships flying around the screen. You’re basically setting traps and letting the physics do the dirty work. I like that. After all those years of trying to keep my spaceship alive, it’s pretty satisfying to finally be the guy throwing the rocks around.

There’s something fun about games that take a familiar idea and flip it around. What if, instead of playing the guy trying to avoid the danger, you actually got to be the thing everyone else is trying to avoid? Spaceships does it with one of the most recognizable arcade games ever made, and it takes just long enough to figure out that your brain has to stop playing Asteroids the old way.

The only thing missing for me is the classic Asteroids sound. Those old Atari sounds were half the game: that hypnotic heartbeat, the laser shots and all those little electronic noises that somehow made a screen full of white lines and rocks feel incredibly important. Spaceships gets the clever part right, but give me those original sounds and I might never leave the keyboard.

After spending all those years trying to be the spaceship, it is strangely satisfying to finally be the asteroid.