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Top Asteroids Scorer Gets Posthumous Award
JayBonci writes "Twin Galaxies is running a story on how after fifteen years, the search for the reigning Asteroids high score champion has ended. The late Scott Safran's family was presented with the award (he died several years ago from a falling injury). It's a pretty interesting article on how Scott's family never knew of his achievement until they were contacted. As it turns out, Twin Galaxies is compiling a book of high score champions of major and classic video games over the years."
Must've cost him a ton of quarters to get to a score like that, only managed to hit about 1,000,000 myself. But I never really played it all that much either.
Hmmmm...with the worlds highest score maybe they should have enlisted him to star in Armageddon.
Really, putting such an obvious typo on the front page is just sloppy... this is supposed to be a geek site, show a little brain power please!
The word you were searching for is "posthumous." From Latin 'posthumus'. No homos involved.
The article isn't all that earthshaking, but it does bring up an interesting thought - this may well be a record that will never be broken. Asteroids is a classic game, and certainly people do still play it and will continue to, but not in the numbers that were playing it at the time. And that was a hell of a high score.
Too bad the guy died...
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
C'est la vie,
Ze French Chef
Makes me think of the advertising computer games on gravestones thread. Here lies Scott Safran, who died saving his pet cat. Asteroid's Hall of Fame 1. Scott Safran 41,336,440 points Just another sig link
Video Game cheats, hints a
What a dumb fucking cunt CmdrTaco is. Look at his 404 error message:
404
This file is not find. Please email me and tell me where you are and where you came from.
Check out the MAME project (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) get the program at the official site here. And get some (illegal) roms at a rom site, like this one here.
adam
He seemed a pretty decent guy. He died trying to save his cat and he played asteroids two hours away for a fund raiser. Shame some one like him still isn't around to bring some more joy to this sometimes sorrow filled world.
I got all the orbs for each weapon up to level nine. I probably won't get an award until I die either...
While he was falling onto the rocks below, Scott Safran thought:
"Oh shit, outta fuel, no time to turn and blast this huge fuckin asteroid hurtlin' towards me!"
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
What is it?
Ok, this is just a rant, but come on, an actual, printed book of the high scores of video games? Where they actually research and try to track down names of people who played a game years ago?
Now, I've heard of some pretty inane shit being published in book form, but this is the only thing that I've seen that doesn't have any use for the content, unless the scores are entertaining in some way.
No, wait, I take it back. I suppose if your name is in the book, you can show it to your friends, but if the book is as large as it's represented on the web site, that doesn't make you all that special, and if it's smaller, that's not exactly going to make copies fly off the shelves.
I did see a book based on old arcade games, talking about what they were like, who produced them, but that was somewhat usable information, if only for nostalgia or wierd fact using conversation.
Ok, that's my soapboxing for this month. Feel free to fire at will, mods.
"What's so random about flipping a coin? Ever heard of the I Ching?"
that stops us from dying. Video games rule too much.
God spoke to me
I can see where this is going - he fell off the roof because his nerves were too frazzled by Asteroids to maintain his balance.
All I could think of is George doing his best frogger impression trying to save his high score. That was classic.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
I've often thought about things like this. I'd really like to know what the world record for Tetris on the Gameboy is (hey, it's a classic and almost everyone has played it).. the game doesn't end, does it?
:-)
Other than that, I've been playing a lot of Freecell and Hearts lately. Some geeks on the net have been logging which Freecell games are hardest to complete, but it seems like only game '11982' is impossible.
Anyone ever shot the moon four times in a row in Hearts?
mogorific carpentry experiments
The score on original asteroids goes round the clock after a measly 99990 points, a fairly trivial target. So unless there is a hidden counter there, someone must have had to watch the whole thing and count how many times he did this. Also, how long did it take - does anyone have any details on this ?
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I distinctly remember playing Asteroids on my Atari 2600 almost constantly an entire summer. I was in my early teens back then, and my mum would bug me to try (in vain, of course :-) to make me leave the house. In the end I got chestpains from being hunched over my console for to long. That made me leave the house once in a while, but MAN was I hooked! Then suddenly I got bored to death with it (after playing 9 hours straight on the same game) and have never played it since.
The only other times I have had this game addiction were with Warlords (on my Amiga) and Civilization (on one of my first PC's), but that's another story.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Imagine this:
;0)
Scott walks up to a babe in a bar.
Scott: "Hey how you doin?"
Babe: "I'm great thanks."
Scott: "Did I mention that I'm the current reining champion for playing Asteroids?"
Babe: "Oooooooo!"
Scott and babe head back to Scott's place and the rest is history
Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?
Many "incredibly too high" high scores that were able to be saved in high score area got there from game malfunctions.
I myself one day had a Battlezone coinop go nutz and practivally mac out my score...
I was good but not that good.
The glitz did not kill the game in play. I did get to see a rare transitional musical interlude stage associated with getting the highest score I assume.
Putting my initials on the ridiculous score was still a thrill.
Besides I wonder if Asteroids goes to the score they cited in the article legitimately anyways.
People used to exaggerate the number of keys they got in pac man past what the machine rom doled out.
I wonder if he got the score via electronic malfunction?
At first I thought this article was about the amateur astronomer who found the most real asteroids with his backyard, home-built, telescope. That is an article I would like to read.
but the 3D version by activision in '99 was pretty good, completed it tons of times but have no idea what my highest score was. i get a server 500 error on the link, has it been /.'ed?
{TheT3chfreak}
just curious...that guy "AAA" was the king of my local pizza joint.
So the question is... Did the cat live?
Type "physical immortality" (with the quotes) into Google and follow the trail. There's growing evidence to indicate that the human body can endure well into the second or third centuries and beyond :)
In other news, the only game I was any good at was Alpine Ski. There was only one guy who could beat me, and after he would leave, I'd body-check the machine, and the tilt-switch would reset the machine, along with the high score. Heh.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
After the comet article, I thought the exact same thing.
BTW, does anyone else think it's slightly odd that they *expected* his parents would know about the accomplishment?
Almost makes me want to get back to the arcade and set some high scores on all the machines. Maybe in fifteen years or so I'll be honored too... hopefully not posthumously, though.
And how long did it take him to score that many points in Asteroids?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
He didn't use patterns. The guy that beat pac-man says he avoided patterns to show his "true" skill at the game. He actually manipulates the ghosts so that they are all very close to him when he gets a power pellet.
BMN
So I've seen some articles that insist the game is spelled "Asteriods", not "Asteroids". Which is it? Or are there two different games?
The comic strip "Funky Winkerbean" is currently running a story about two fromer arch-rival video game champs finally settling the score on who was the best way back when.
One of the regular characters was vistited by "The Eliminator", a former 11-year old master, who supposedly was best but never competed against each other in "Space Invaders". This took place in the 80's and basically the characters are two middle-aged geeks going through a middle-age crisis. Crazy Harry is an avid Star Trek Fan and mailman. "The Eliminator" is a character who always wore a helmet simular to the helmet Luke work in the orginal "Star Wars" during his first blind light saber training.
I wonder if the story line is related. Would have been an interesting tribute (sort of. No disrespect for the dead) except they are battling over who is the ultimate "Space Invaders" master. They are settling over a rematch on an old machine in a pizza parlor's basement that still works.
An interesting side note: Funky keeps making a comment how the game is running much slower then he remembers. A tribute to the old game programmers who did so much with so little resources for hardware and processing power they had back then.
He would have loved slurm.
Don't most video games have switches for difficulty levels? How do we know he didn't do it on easy?
The only game I ever mastered enough to play indefinitely was Mystic Marathon. I actually just gave up and went home after a couple of hours.
"All representatives are busy. The estimated hold time is one..hundred..sixty..four..minutes." Detroit Edison, 02/01/02
Speaking of different names, there were tons of clones, too.
Ahh, the memories:
Megaroids -- Would not run on my new Mac Plus from the Umich computer kickoff, while it would run on everyone else's. None of their diagnostic programs could find a problem.
Hemiroids -- A joke name, the game consisted of 3-D prerendered Hemi-asteroids, or asteroids cut in half. Beyond the name, the game was one of the better implementations.
"All representatives are busy. The estimated hold time is one..hundred..sixty..four..minutes." Detroit Edison, 02/01/02
- The player's ship movement and control in Asteroids is more realistic than most of the other videogames: speed and position depend on the acceleration given by the ship's motor instead of the usual unrealistic up down left right controls. The only missing thing is gravitational attraction (which can be found on another vintage game, Gravitar). ;) ).
The movement of enemy ufos is not so realistic but they are aliens, they know things about instant acceleration in space that we don't
- The playability of the game is excellent, as the game gets harder my tongue sticks out (that means it keeps me concentrated, good sign for the game, bad sign for me, i'm getting addicted...)
- Unlike many other games, you just don't shoot to everything that moves, you can play using different tactics (one can either split lots of asteroids so the enemy ufos have a tougher time or try to keep the battlefield tidy)
- There are some drawbacks like the randomness when hitting hyperspace button, the ufo which won't shoot on one side of the screen to get you on the opposite one, like you can (hey this is a feature...).But they were addressed in "Asteroids deluxe": 1980 and running on a 1.5 mhz 8 bit processor, according to the MAME emulator. Gee.
Personally my all-time favourite is Xevious, and i love the photorealism of recent games, but if I should vote for the best videogame ever i'd choose Asteroids.
I'm trying to remember, but it seems like every 100,000 points would take about 20 minutes. Instead of clearing the screen of all asteroids, you would leave one slow one. Then, you would get your ship to fly straight up and down (the screen wrapped) and shoot the little alien ships. These things are 1000 points apiece, and every 10,000 points, you get a new ship. They come out about every 20 seconds, so with shooting time, you could probably kill 2, maybe 3 a minute. If 3 a minute, it would take 33 minutes to get to 100,000 points. 5 hours to get to 1,000,000 points. 200 hours to get to 40,000,000 points.
Maybe they come out a little faster than that. If you kill one as soon as it appears, you might be able to get one every 10 seconds. So it would only take 100 hours of playing.
Anybody else who played it got a better idea of how long this took and how they verified the score? I don't want to throw the bullshit flag, but the fact is, the game didn't keep score over 99,990 and I can't believe anyone played for 100 hours straight. The extra ships pile up, and you can just let the game sit while you eat and go to the bathroom, but I have no clue how you would get this high of a score. I remember reading about some guy who was trying for the high score and passed out after 27 hours. I, myself, could never go more than 2 hours before getting tired. I don't know that I ever even got 1 million points.
It was a good way to while away some time at the Majik Market, though. In a later life, I got good at Missile Command and was able to wrap that at 1 million points. Then all the fighting games started to take over and I got tired of it.