I’m sorry I missed this one yesterday but being a day late doesn’t hurt. Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of Scott Safran setting the still unbroken high score record on Atari’s Asteroids, setting the bar at the jaw dropping 41,336,440 points (it should be noted that Twin Galaxies lists the date as 1982 so I am not sure if that is a typo or not). How long did it take to hit that record? Three days, two nights. No pause button to hold the game, no comfy couch to get lazy on and I don’t know how he handled eating and the bathroom but if anyone deserves to be considered a video game champion, it would have to be Scott.
Of course there are other records much like that from early 80’s arcade games where it took a couple of days to set the high score. One I know of off the top of my head is Atari’s Star Wars where Robert Mruczek came in with an astounding 300,007,894 which also stands up today (that high score will hit 25 years unbroken on 1/22/2009 so get cracking if you think you have a chance). Of course you don’t really see this sort of thing in any game today, arcade, console or PC since everything “has” to have an ending.Maybe if a few games decided to be bold and drop the whole ending component in favor of the never-ending one found in many classic games we could see a few more very interesting games/ideas come around
[Via Kotaku via Wired] [Discuss on the Forums]
